Re: Verboseness - XML Syntax for XQuery 1.0 (XQueryX)

[Vassilis Papadimos <vpapad@cse.ogi.edu>]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 11:21:11AM +0100, Dylan Walsh wrote:
> > 
> At the bottom of this email is an excerpt. As you can see, the
> equivalent XML is very, very long-winded. It is using an element syntax
> for the XPath expressions, and it also heavily expands the XQuery parts
> aswell. When I heard about the XML Syntax, I thought that was an
> excellent developement, as an alternative to the existing text syntax,
> with its pseuodo elements etc. However this XML Syntax below is such
> that it is unlikely to be used for hand written querys.

I don't think the XQueryX syntax was intended to be particularly 
human-writable, or even human-readable. To quote from the lastest
XQuery doc.:

"The Query Working Group has identified a requirement for both a human-readable 
 query syntax and an XML-based query syntax. XQuery is designed to meet the 
 first of these requirements. For an alternative, XML-based syntax for 
 the XQuery semantics, see [XQueryX 1.0] "

You can find similar language in the introduction to XQueryX. I think the
primary purpose was to have an easy-to-parse format, that 
reflects the structure of the query. It's like an intermediate language
in a compiler, between the programming language and the assembly language,
that's easier for tools to work on.

For what it's worth, with my DB background, i don't feel 
"alien" at all with the textual format of XQuery (and Quilt, XML-QL etc.), 
while I find XSLT rather hard to read and write. Maybe it's because
I don't have any specialized tools for that, and just use regular text
editors?

To my XSLT-untrained eyes, it seems that I have to read/write much more
code that I would write in SQL/XQuery (primarily because of the endless
closing tags you see at the end of every XSLT program!) 

Maybe it all comes down to design goal #10 of XML:

	10. Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

Oh well!

Best regards,

Vassilis.