Re: [xml-dev] The use of XML syntax in XML Query

[ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson)]

David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> writes:

<snip/>

> In XSLT I can write my stylesheet in any encoding I want, but still
> query the full range of XML documents. For example
> 
> <xsl:value-of select="&#xe9;"/>
> 
> would return the value of the element with name e-acute.
> 
> In Xquery, as in Xpath, you can not use & within a Qname and so there
> is no equivalent to this XSLT construct in Xquery, one has to write out
> the Qname with character data, which means that the encoding of the
> query document has to include these characters. (Perhaps all Xquery
> documents are in utf8? in which case this is not an issue technically
> but might still be inconvenient for users. However I can see no mention
> of the possible encodings of a query document within the current draft so
> it's hard to be sure what is proposed here.

<snip/>

I think there's a confusion here.  XPath and XQuery are expression
languages.  There's no such thing as an 'XQuery document' as such, as
far as I understand.  You can embed XPath and/or XQuery expressions in
XML documents any way you like.  So the following is perfectly OK:

<myQR>
&lt;bib>
            {
             for $b in document("http://www.bn.com";)/bib/book
             where $b/publisher = "Addison-Wesley" and $b/@year > 1991
             return
               &lt;livre ann&#xe9;e={ $b/@year }>
                &lt;cr&#xe9;ateur> { $b/author } &lt;/cr&#xe9;ateur>
                { $b/title }
               &lt;/livre>
            }
&lt;/bib>
</myQR>

ht
-- 
  Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
          W3C Fellow 1999--2001, part-time member of W3C Team
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	    Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
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