Re: XQuery & XSLT was RE: Verboseness - XML Syntax for XQuery 1.0(XQueryX)

[Murali Mani <mani@CS.UCLA.EDU>]

I have not been looking too much into the XQuery drafts for a few months
now -- but I think the following are true to the best of my knowledge --

a) semantics is more important than syntax, but probably they are also
linked together -- i think we need to think more about the semantics -- do
we need duplicate nodes returned from a path expression in XQuery?? --
this has been my *biggest* concern for almost a year now...

b) The data model appears still quite incomplete to me -- do you want to
use IDREFS to represent ordered list of elements?? -- is document order
the only order in which you want to use??? for example, consider types --
Book, Person, with an IDREFS attribute for Books referring to Person
representing the list of Authors in one xml document -- so is there a way
of getting the list of Authors as such without using some additional
attribute for representing order (as we have to do in the relational
model)?? -- I think use of IDREFS for representing ordered binary
relationships without attributes might be useful...???

c) About syntax -- I look at XQueryX examples being sent in mails in
xml-dev (or)  xml-query... I see keywords like SLASHSLASH -- hmm, i think
such keywords eliminate humans totally out of the loop from XQueryX ..???
I think there might be humans who like to take short-cuts, and take an
XQueryX query directly and try to modify it -- they might take the
trouble to learn XQueryX keywords, rather than use the tool for the
conversion -- others getting involved in the project might feel totally
out of place if the previous person was using such short-cuts..???

<warning>speaking for himself only</warning>

regards - murali.