xml-dev - RE: XML and LDAP: Common APIs?

[johns@syscore.com (John F. Schlesinger)]

Francis wrote:
"...Xpath (unlike XML-Schema)doesn't understand basic types like dates"

I don't need data types to query. When I ask for a node where an attribute
has a certain value I need to provide my value, but I don't need to know the
data type. Most likely my programming language is going to cast everything
to a common representation to do the comparison anyway.

Yours,
John F Schlesinger
SysCore Solutions
212 619 5200 x 219
917 886 5895 Mobile

-----Original Message-----
From: Francis Norton [mailto:francis@redrice.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2000 12:31 PM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: XML and LDAP: Common APIs?




"John F. Schlesinger" wrote:
>
...
> Using XPath for LDAP databases is a great idea. We could even replace
> Segment Search Arguments for accessing IMS databases! The UNIX and Windows
> file systems could be accessed using XPath which would make scripts much
> easier to write (or, indeed, read). XPath could be added to tree controls
> for user interface coding. Neat.
>
Let me play devil's advocate here.

How would you get past the difficulty that Xpath (unlike XML-Schema)
doesn't understand basic types like dates, which could be a fairly
important search attribute for queries?

Also wouldn't you want to wait until or unless XPath acquires regular
expressions (treat the content of a file as mixed text content?) for
doing text searches?

Francis.
--
Francis Norton.

Defy Convention? Deify Convention!