RE: XQuery -- Reinventing the Wheel?

[Jonathan Robie <Jonathan.Robie@SoftwareAG-USA.com>]

At 12:33 AM 2/23/2001 -0800, Evan Lenz wrote:

>Your inline XSLT examples completely miss the point. The reason they are
>included in my paper is to identify the problem, not to propose a particular
>solution--the problem of course being that the semantics, the data model,
>the processing model, whatever you want to call it, of XSLT and XQuery are
>very, very similar, but not the same. There is no good reason why the
>semantics of XQuery should not coincide with that subset of XSLT that might
>succinctly be called XSLT's "down-reference pull" (as opposed to the "push"
>of template rules, and the random access of the other XPath axes). I think
>the debate over syntax is starting to cloud this deeper issue.

We may be closer in our thinking than I thought. I believe that a unified 
data model would be a Very Good Thing. As far as processing model goes,  I 
think that the overlap is not complete. I don't want each language to have 
to support the part of the other language's processing model that does not 
overlap. In particular, I don't think that XQuery needs to have templates 
and match patterns.

Jonathan

These are my opinions right now. They may be quite different from the 
opinions of Software AG, the W3C XML Query Working Group, or the opinions 
that I will have after reading and considering your response.