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At 06:49 PM 5/13/2002 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>On Sat, 2002-05-11 at 15:09, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> > Here's perhaps the core statement of your earlier email.
> >
> > >Precisely. It gets very tiring to be told to talk in terms which mirror
> > >the expectations of the designers and which address only details of the
> > >specification (and preferably on the official lists). Or did you really
> > >mean that I was supposed to argue on your turf and your turf only?
> >
> > I think I asked you to be concrete. I think I also asked for use cases,
> > examples, concrete implementation concerns, or anything else concrete
> > enough to be evaluated on a technical level.
>
>And my point, stated repeatedly but apparently not clearly enough, is
>that "concrete implementation" is not the root of the problem. It's a
>horribly ill-considered set of priorities that have produced a mammoth
>specification whose likely concrete contributions are going to be the
>salvageable fragments that other developers can rescue.
Here are some key goals for XQuery:
- Suitability for combining data
- Optimizability for both physical XML and XML views of non-XML data
- Type safety and type-based optimizability
- Implementability
- Straightforward solutions for the published use cases
- Teachability
I think we are doing a reasonable goal of meeting these needs. Yes, even
the teachability - and I teach a lot of XQuery workshops. Most of these do
not seem to be goals for you. Well, it's just possible that you are not our
target audience. That's OK. No spec has to be all things to all people.
>Discussion of syntax nits while architecture is looking dismal is
>generally not my preferred way to clean up a standard.
Syntax nits aren't very interesting. Asking you to say something concrete
is not the same thing as asking you to criticize our choice of keywords.
>The W3C XML Schema folks used precisely the same tactics to make it
>clear that they would not or could change their broken foundations and,
>well, look at the mess.
Asking for nouns rather than adjectives? It's a really sneaky tactic, I
admit...
Jonathan
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