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

[Dylan Walsh <Dylan.Walsh@Kadius.Com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Vassilis Papadimos [SMTP:vpapad@cse.ogi.edu]
> Sent:	Thursday, June 14, 2001 7:26 PM
> To:	Dylan Walsh
> Cc:	xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject:	Re: Verboseness - XML Syntax for XQuery 1.0 (XQueryX)
> 
> 
>I don't think the XQueryX syntax was intended to be particularly 
>human-writable, or even human-readable. 

True, but I think it should be, or that they should have a human
writeable XML syntax available
aswell.

>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?

I use a regular text editor for XSLT. However, I'm not saying that they
should use XSLT, just that:
1. for the results part of the query, they should adopt the XSLT
template body format or something similar.
2. wherever XSLT and XQuery overlap in in their use of e.g. XPath, they
should try to be consistent.

There is an excellent presentation on XQuery and XSLT here:
http://xmlportfolio.com/xsltuk/slides/

My impression from that is that XQuery contains many changes from
equivalent functionality in XSLT, some which are improvements, but end
result is two somewhat similar languages with many superflous
differences.

>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!) 

That's XML for ya! :-)

>Maybe it all comes down to design goal #10 of XML:
>
>	10. Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

... which contradicts your complaint about XSLT. What I'm suggesting is
to create a syntax that is only slightly more verbose than the text
version, with only the major parts of the query as elements. However the
results part would consist of actual elements rather than pseudo
elements. XQuery has taken the cryptic part of XSLT (XPath) but dropped
a very straight forward part (the template body). 
Why *not* use a syntax which creates XML elements from examples, and
which is well-formed XML itself, when such a syntax has already exists?