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5/12/2002 12:29:32 PM, Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com> wrote:
>
>What can we do to help Mother Nature, Father Darwin and the Invisible
>Hand (strange mental picture, that) on their course?
All I can suggest is pushing for multiple conformance levels. The DOM
has always done this, XHTML, SVG, and probably others that don't
come to mind right now have moved in that direction. It would certainly
be nice to see a menu of choices that build off a minimal core
XPath 2 and add FLWR, typing (in one or more levels), transformations
(in XSLT and XQuery element constructor flavors) and allow updates
to come along in parallel with the other modules, all on a
different timetable. I suspect that there are practical complications
that I can't begin to fathom here, however.
Nevertheless, if WG's don't define what the minimum interoperability
profile for a spec is, someone else will step in to do it for
them. The emergence of the WS-I to make web services interoperate,
with or without the cooperation of the W3C, should be a warning.
XQuery has created a vacuum by not giving itself a
requirement for data manipulation features, but giving itself
other requirements that have consumed much of its time. SOMEBODY will
fill this vacuum -- an existing organization, a new ad hoc
organization, or some back-channel coordination (a la the
soapbuilders mailing list). Whoever that "somebody" turns out to
be will be awfully tempted to coordinate minimal conformance
levels as well.
[Before Jonathan starts in on me, I'm not speaking for my
employer, nor describing anything other than my personal best
guess for how the dilemmas posed by XQuery's long term promise
but short term frustrations will be resolved.]
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