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

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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@xegesis.org] 
> Sent: Wednesday, July 03, 2002 2:35 PM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: RE: [xml-dev] XQuery and DTD/Schema?
> 
> I don't claim a deep understanding of structural typing vs 
> named typing.  I guess I 
> have three reasons for being nervous about the direction 
> XQuery is taking.  

Thanks for stating that up front. 
 
> First, I like specs that are either a) well grounded in 
> actual practice or b) 
> grounded in well-understood theory.  The actual practice with 
> WXSDL's type systems 
> for non-trivial schemas seems spotty at best; this list is 
> full of rather disturbing 
> discussions that do not give me a warm feeling that people 
> who understand this 
> better than I do have the situation under control.  

I've actually seen shipping products that use the W3C XML Schema type
system. How many have you seen that used tree-based regular expressions
as a type system for XML? 

> XDuce may 
> not be "well- understood theory", but a lot more work has 
> gone into it than the current XQuery 
> type system, no?  What can anyone say to assure me that this 
> is not "computer 
> science by committee?" 

XDuce is a research product whose descendants have all been research
projects as well. Trying to squeeze research ideas into a W3C standard
is exactly "computer science by committee". Your rant is correct but
inverted. 

> I can think of lots of scenarios where I would want my 
> get-total() function to 
> process the  "merely well-formed elements whose name happens 
> to be 'invoice'".
> 

I agree. I am both dissappointed and stunned that such functionality
does not exist in XQuery. 
 
> Finally, while I can understand the Query WG's desire to 
> build on the rest of the 
> W3C infrastructure, in practice this named typing approach 
> disenfranchises the 
> majority of the world that doesn't (yet???) use W3C Schema. 

What do you suggest? That the XML Query working group ignore W3C XML
Schema because a lot of projects already used DTDs? Do you also suggest
we stop building any Java/C#/VB.NET programs because too many people
still use COBOL/C/Fortran and they are disenfranchised by not being able
to interact with APIs written in newer programming languages? 


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