Re: Access to Schema API information

[Sorry for earlier no-comment reply!]

Michael Kay writes:

> On 22/05/2012 11:06, Henry S. Thompson wrote:
>> Michael Kay writes:
>>
>>> I have been implementing a Saxon extension that exposes the Schema
>>> Component Model to XSLT and XQuery applications
>> Using functions is cool, but did you consider sticking with XPath?
> It does stick with XPath, only it's XPath 3.0...
>
> I think that attempts to model this information using elements and
> attributes suffer two main problems:
>
> (a) the node identity problem.

Good point.

> (b) the network modelling problem: the schema component model is a
> network, while XML is best at modelling trees. Any attempt to model a
> graph in XML leads to (a) to arbitrary decisions about which
> relationships to model as XML parent/child relationships, and (b) very
> clumsy navigation when you have to follow the non-hierarchic links.

Not necessarily -- you can use XPath over an arbitrary directed graph
just fine (modulo some issues wrt cycles and //, but those are
reasonably straightforward to resolve).  You can't _serialise_
re-entrant or cyclic graphs as vanilla XML, but that's not relevant to
the task at hand.

ht
-- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
                Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
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Received on Tuesday, 18 September 2012 09:31:15 UTC