Re: [xml-dev] Failed XML standards

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@ibiblio.org>]

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Simon St.Laurent
<simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:

> At this point, personally, I'd drop coverage of XLink and XPointer.  A
> paragraph seems reasonable.
>
> XInclude does get use in back-end processing, so I'd leave it in, most
> likely - at least as a sidebar in the entity processing section.  It doesn't
> require a huge amount of space to explain in any case.

Sounds about right, though XInclude references XPointer so it's hard
to really say.

Maybe the next edition of XML in a Nutshell, if it's even worth
writing at this point, should drop the XLink and XPointer chapters and
use the space for XQuery.

The problem I keep running up against whenever I think about a
potential 4th edition (besides complete lack of time) is that XPath
2/XSLT 2/XQuery are really a book in their own right. In fact, they're
probably two books. Possibly XQuery in a Nutshell is the book I should
be writing, which would of course cover XPath 2 as well. This book
would ignore XPath 1/XSLT 1, which would stay in XML in a Nutshell
since they're very widely used and will continue to be so. I'm not
sure what to do about XSLT 2. Maybe I should just leave that to
Michael Kay's book. And then again the whole nutshell format is
increasingly weak given wide access to Web references, so maybe that's
not the XQuery book the world needs right now. In fact, I'm pretty
sure it isn't.

Curious what folks think about this. Which book would you buy? What
book would your companies and clients buy multiple copies of if it
existed? Or should we just give up on the whole notion of new XML
books?

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@ibiblio.org