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At 06:17 AM 5/11/2002 -0400, AndrewWatt2000@aol.com wrote:
>I have asked you what is the vision for XPath and each time you have (in
>the posts I have seen) failed to answer.
>
>How am I to interpret that? These are some possibilities that come to mind:
>1. A clear strategy exists but you decline/refuse to share it. Impression
>given - W3C does not consider us significant enough to have access to that
>information.
>2. No clear strategy exists. Impression given - you don't want us to
>realise how ad hoc all this is.
>
>There are other variants but hopefully you get the idea.
[[ !!! SNIP !!! ]
>So, I will ask you once more: "What is the vision/strategy for XPath 2.0?".
Actually, I have responded to requests on this topic, pointing you to the
XPath 2.0 requirements document. This is largely a set of requests that
XSLT users have made for extensions to XPath, as I understand it. Since
XQuery provides these features, XPath has been taking them up. That's an
incremental, rather than a revolutionary vision. I'm not convinced that
current XPath users need anything revolutionary. However, support for types
*is* one of the features that has been requested.
The main places I see XPath being used today are in XSLT patterns, for
querying XML stored in databases, and as a sublanguage in various
home-grown systems. I have not seen a lot of commercial support for
XPointer to date.
Another *very* important vision for XPath 2.0 is to have a more orthogonal
language, getting rid of a lot of the complicated special casing in XPath
1.0 that made it difficult to use as a subset of XQuery.
Jonathan
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