[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
On Mon, May 12, 2003 at 11:02:04AM -0400, Jonathan Robie wrote:
>Of course, many of these same people are also writing essays explaining the
>epistemological and geopolitical reasons that W3C Working Groups are not
>listening to their great wisdom. One of the most basic reasons some of
>these people are being ignored is that they are not making any specific
>technical comments based on a careful reading of the specifications.
That is, in part, because "specific technical comments" is a euphemism for
"we don't have time to listen to criticisms of architecture; if you'd like
us to change some of the decorations, speak up."
In my opinion, building the data model on the type collection thrown
together in W3C XML Schema part two is a serious mistake (and yes, I *have*
been reading the specs, and trying to figure out some of the really
interesting nonsense like why asking for a date/time component returns it as
GMT, instead of as its local/lexical reality). The working group in
general, and some members in particular, would like to hear *specific*
criticisms of *specific* types. Foo. I want a type system. The specs have
moved in this direction, but not far enough, in my opinion.
The "specific technical criticism" here is that tying XPath/XSLT (I don't
much care what happens with XQuery, I think it has different requirements)
to W3C XML Schema's collection of datatypes creates dangerous fragility and
probably devalues the genuinely interesting innovations in XPath/XSLT 2.0,
because they are too weighted with the freight of a type non-system. Others
have already proposed, as a specific technical solution, that a conformance
level for XPath and XSLT that requires *no knowledge* of W3C XML Schema
datatypes could be defined. That means that implementors don't have to
build in the types so that the casting can happen. The working group has
moved in this direction by permitting a conformance level in which the XPath
/ XSLT implementors do not need to actually parse schema. This suggestion
effectively says "XPath 1.0 has a much more comprehensible type system than
W3C XML Schema part two. We don't want to trade comprehensibility for the
exceedingly dubious benefits of strong typing without a type system."
Amy!
--
Amelia A. Lewis amyzing {at} talsever.com
Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for the lead role in a cage?
-- Pink Floyd
|
