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At 10:23 AM -0800 1/3/02, Ronald Bourret wrote:
>Why is XQuery sacrosanct in this respect? You can't paste code or SQL
>statements into an XML document without escaping stuff, so why should
>XQuery be any different?
Nobody's going to confuse Java or SQL with XML. People will confuse
XQuery with XML.
Languages designed for processing XML documents should either be XML
themselves (XSLT, Schemas) or totally non-XML (XPath) but in-between
these two poles lies disaster. Even XPath sometimes causes me
problems with <, &, and ". I can at least recognize the problems when
they arise, curse once, and fix them. But it takes most XSLT users a
lot longer than this to fix these problems. XQuery as proposed will
be far worse.
>The point of the XQuery surface syntax is to
>provide an easily readable format for querying XML documents. It does
>this. If you want an XML format of an XQuery statement that you can cut
>and paste, use XQueryX.
>
I want both at the same time, and see no reason I can't have that.
:-) For the record, I specifically reject any syntax so complicated
that I can't write it in BBEdit. i.e. no special tools should be
necessary to generate an XQuery. I'm smart enough to write SQL and
XSLT by hand. Why does XQuery need to be any more complex than this?
That rules XQueryX as it exists now, but it could be fixed if that
were considered desirable by the working group. I'm also flexible
enough to accept a completely non-XML syntax. But I can't imagine
trying to teach and explain this wishy-washy, in-between mess that's
being proposed.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
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| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/ |
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