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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Kay [mailto:michael.h.kay@ntlworld.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2002 6:11 AM
> To: 'Champion, Mike'; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: RE: [xml-dev] W3C's five new XQuery/Xpath2 working drafts -
> Still missing Updates
>
> But I also worry about the cost we are asking users to pay
> (learning costs, transition costs, cost of complexity) to achieve these
> benefits. It's a fine judgement to get the balance right.
Right. FWIW, I can make a more compelling argument for adding simple types
(so that people can query on floats or dates without insisting that the
string representations match), than I can for adding full schema support
(e.g., so that a query processor can infer that valid instances of a schema
could not possibly match a query). That seems to incorporate the lessons of
SQL (as near as I can tell from this thread and from some Googling) --
people use the simple types in simple ways, but getting into type theory and
user-defined types quickly leads to Interoperability Hell.
The larger issues that Mike Kay raises are critical: All this committee work
is for nothing if the result is too complex or expensive to actually use. I
am not all that much dumber than the average software developer, I have
followed the XML world full-time for 5 years now, and this
schema/PSVI/strongly-typed XQuery stuff makes my head spin. I can't imagine
what ordinary developers who don't focus on XML will think of it.
Actually, come to think of it, I can ... it will be C++ and the Windows API
all over again; few developers go anywhere near it without GUI tools and
wizards to hide the complexity behind a proprietary front end. Sigh, I
thought that was what we were trying to put behind us....
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