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Very much agree with sentiments expressed re complexity. As a
gamekeeper (stds developer) turned poacher (user) it seems to be true
that:
- the first standard works but has some problems
- the second one/version solves the problems and adds 500% complexity
- by then the original problems have work-arounds which are well
understood and work
So the second one often does not get serious take-up until a long
time later. But somehow we should be learning how to do this better.
Robin
At 4:45 pm +0200 1/10/02, Eric van der Vlist wrote:
>On Tue, 2002-10-01 at 16:23, Jeni Tennison wrote:
>> Hi Eric,
>>
>> > I don't know how representative it is, but there is also at least
>> > one person (me) who has started to read these specs, seen that he
>> > didn't agree with the requirements and didn't consider that the
>> > addded complexity over XPath 1.0 is not worth the pain IHO and just
>> > can't comment because he has no comments except "I'll stay with
>> > XPath 1.0 and exslt as much as I can"...
>>
>> Which of the requirements don't you agree with? Do you have
>> requirements that aren't or can't be met using extensions to XPath 1.0
>> (e.g. for conditional expressions in XPath)?
>
>Basically the requirement I don't agree with is that it needs to be a
>basis for XQuery and become strongly typed.
>
>More generally, I think that the balance of features between XPath and
>XSLT 1.0 was pretty good (with maybe a couple of minor exceptions which
>could be discussed such as document() and format-number() that could
>have been part of XPath IMO) and shouldn't be radically changed.
>
>> In other words, are you
>> saying that you don't think that XPath 2.0 is a good idea full stop
>> (period), or are you saying that *this* XPath 2.0 isn't a good idea?
>
>I don't feel like a stone resisting any change and I must say not *this*
>XPath 2.0 even though the XPath 2.0 I would like would be 100 times
>closer to XPath 1.0 than to *this* XPath 2.0.
>
>> If it's the latter, then I think you've got a really good comment
>> right there: "I was hoping that XPath 2.0 would meet my requirement to
>> A, B and C but the complexity of XPath 2.0 means that the pain's not
>> worth the gain. XPath 2.0 could be made simpler in order to satisfy my
>> requirements without causing me pain by X, Y and Z."
>
>But my requirements A, B and C are so tiny that are completely masked by
>the level of modifications which is envisioned.
>
>> I guess voting with your feet is OK, but that's what I meant about
>> drawing the analogy with XLink. 2 or 3 years down the line we might
>> realise that actually we did need some of the stuff that XPath 2.0
>> does, but we're not using it because it's not designed in the way we
>> needed it to be.
>
>I don't want to sound negative, but I don't remember any of the comments
>I have ever done to a W3C WG having ever been taken into account in a
>positive way.
>
>> Another thing we could try is to have a switch that makes XSLT 2.0 use
>> XPath 1.0. XSLT 2.0 has some really useful stuff (multiple output
>> documents, grouping, result-tree-fragments out the window,
>> user-defined functions) so it'd be a real shame if we couldn't use
>> them just because we wanted to avoid XPath 2.0.
>
>If you say so I trust you that XSLT 2.0 must be a good thing! I'd note
>though that the features you're mentioning are already implemented
>through exslt. Having them as standard XSLT features would be great but
>only if the price to pay can be lowered!
>
>Another concern I have is that I am not sure that it would be quickly
>implemented and deploied in the major web browsers. Of course I can't
>tell since I am not part of W3C, but do you have any commitment from
>Microsoft about this?
>
>Thanks
>
>Eric
>--
>Rendez-vous a Paris (Forum XML).
> http://www.technoforum.fr/integ2002/index.html
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Eric van der Vlist http://xmlfr.org http://dyomedea.com
>(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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--
-- -----------------------------------------------------------------
Robin La Fontaine, Director, Monsell EDM Ltd
DeltaXML: "Change control for XML, in XML"
Tel: +44 1684 592 144 Fax: +44 1684 594 504
Email: robin.lafontaine@deltaxml.com http://www.deltaxml.com
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