RE: [xml-dev] Concerned about the increasing reliance on XPath

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Sat, 2011-05-07 at 11:26 -0400, David Lee wrote:
[...]

>  Its
> true that some work has been done with 'streamable xpath' that can avoid
> this is some cases, but in general, the high level XML tools in general
> (XPath, XQuery, XSLT etc) are based on an in-memory representation.
> (ignoring XML Databases for the moment).

"They're in memory except when they aren't"?  The Working Groups
designing XPath 2, XSLT 2 and XQuery 1 were very aware that the data
model instances over which these languages operate might not be entirely
in main memory...

> Fortunately there is some awesome work going on to support streamable
> subsets into XPath, XSLT and XQuery ... 
There are already streaming XQuery implementations (although I don't
know any standalone ones that are developed actively today) 


> If you didn't have XPath you probably  couldn't implement your "simpler"
> solution any more efficiently, and would loose in flexibility.

We do agree here ;-)

Liam

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Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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