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At 09:51 AM 5/7/2002 -0400, Thomas B. Passin wrote:
>This is really the "it's a document" vs. "It's data" argument, isn't it? If
>I'm creating an XML message to transport data from a database, then I want a
>date to be a date and not just a string. If I'm marking up an article,
>everything is text.
[ !!! SNIP !!! ]
>The point is that there is room and need for both. The real question is how
>to avoid extra complexity and large, slow programs for those users, like
>Simon and apparently Rusty (and, most of the time, me), who don't want to
>use typing capabilities.
>
>Does anyone see a way to have a typing mechanism in XPath/XSLT be in an
>optional layer?
In fact, datatypes are optional in XML schema, static typing will probably
be optional in XQuery (there is a note in the XQuery document to that
effect), and the operators of XQuery and XPath are all defined for untyped
data as well as for typed data. I think that we have put a *lot* of work
into making sure that our type system scales to typed data, untyped data,
and mixtures of the two.
One of the reasons that I would like to bring this discussion to the level
of real queries on real data is that I am not sure that everyone involved
in the discussion actually knows how XQuery works.
Please, can we see some queries that cause problems, or things that are
hard to say or do in XQuery?
Jonathan
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