[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Michael Kay wrote:
> XQuery is not a big language. It is arguably smaller than XSLT 1.0.
The argument for that proposition would be more than a little
jesuitical. The only way you could claim that would be by ignoring the
complexity of XPath 2.0 vs. XPath 1.0, and since XPath 2.0 is a
necessary part of XQuery and XPath 1.0 is a necessary part of XSLT 1.0,
I don;t think that's fair. A conformant implementation of XQuery 1.0
would be immensely bigger than a conformant implementation of XSLT 1.0.
At one point I would have said XQuery 1.0/XSLT 2.0 was conceptually
simpler than XSLT 1.0 based mostly on the differences between sequences
and node-sets/result tree fragments. Unfortunately, the working group
started making exceptions to the clear and practical sequence logic in
the name of performance, and therefore thoroughly muddied what had been
a exemplar of clarity to the point where I can no longer be sure whether
any function will work with any particular data type without reference
to the spec. Thus the conceptual framework no longer seems simpler and
clearer to me. :-(
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim
|
