RE: [xml-dev] XQuery and DTD/Schema?

["Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@microsoft.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@xegesis.org] 
> Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2002 7:24 PM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: RE: [xml-dev] XQuery and DTD/Schema?
> 
> >[0]http://www.w3.org/TR/query-datamodel/#IDASOVR
> >
> 
> Sheesh, Dare, read that section as if you were doing so for 
> the first time, 
> and THEN ask yourself why people who don't actually get 
> paid/forced to read that spec (all 900 pages!  Oops, sorry, 
> only 750 if you factor out the duplicates...) 
> don't do so! 

That's actually a fairly straightforward part of the XQuery family of
drafts. Granted one needs some context (i.e. knowledge of the XML
infoset information items and the post-schema validation infoset items)
to grasp what it's about but after that it isn't as much goobly gook as
the XQuery formal semantics, the W3C XML Schema Structures REC or the
RELAX NG specification. 

I guess I should provide a capsule summary next time I link to W3C recs
if they inspire such revulsion; the link describes a mapping from a PSVI
(i.e. a W3C XML Schema validated XML document) to the XQuery type system
and implies that a similar mapping between a DTD validated XML document
and the XQuery type system is forthcoming. 

 
> My understanding of the answer to Betty's question is that to 
> use all the bells and whistles of XQuery you do need to use a 
> schema. 

This is only if the bells and whistles are important to her use cases. I
can similarly state that to use all the bells and whistles of C++ one
needs to use templates, RTTI and structured exception handling but many
people build apps without these with little problem (you don't need to
look much further than the Mozilla project for proof of this).

So I consider your statement a red herring. :) 

> Anyway, if you want to just treat everything as being 
> characters, you can certainly use XQuery to query arbitrary 
> XML without a DTD/WXSDL/DBMS schema definition.
> 

Exactly.  


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