Re: XML Ain't What It Used To Be

[Joe English <jenglish@flightlab.com>]

Keith Wedinger wrote:

> Just read this article on XML.com and I have to agree.  The preponderance of
> new XML specs/standards seems to have turned a relatively simply mark-up
> language into a full blown, rather complicated software development
> environment.  But, anyone doing XML development work is certainly not forced
> to use all of these standards.

Not entirely, but there are some dependencies.

One disconcerting trend is the reliance of XQuery and other
specs (which I might want to use) on W3C XML Schemas (which
I do *not* want).

XSLT, XQuery, XPointer, and XLink all rely on XPath.
Now XPath is a perfect match for XSLT, but IMO it's much
more powerful than what is needed for the others.  The
extra power has a price: it makes it harder to implement
the specs built on top of it.  Sometimes implementors can
leverage existing work, but not always -- for example,
you can't just take Saxon's XPath implementation (which
is one of the best) and plug it into Kweelt (one of the
more promising XQuery-like implementations); the
internal data structures are far too different.


--Joe English

  jenglish@flightlab.com