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

["David Lee" <dlee@calldei.com>]

IMHO ... 

I think XPath "suffers" in ways XQuery and XSLT do not because it is more
reliant on the surrounding infrastructure.

And it *seems* that it was intended to be part of a bigger ecosystem, not a
standalone thing.
Otherwise things like setting the namespace bindings would be part of the
xpath language , not required to be set by the container environment.

Hence XPath is *inherently* dependent on the peculiarities of the context in
which its used.
This could be a feature or a bug depending on your point of view.

Feature: 
	Imagine how big XPath expressions (which are stateless) would be if
you had to do all the namespace bindings in every one.
Bug:  
	You cant write a "portable" XPath statement without the
environmental specific settings.






----------------------------------------
David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Kay [mailto:mike@saxonica.com] 
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2011 11:54 AM
To: stephengreenubl@gmail.com
Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Concerned about the increasing reliance on XPath


On 09/05/2011 16:49, Stephen D Green wrote:
> I think we tend to hope that XPath expressions can be
> written such that they are immune from such implementation
> specifics

Yes, indeed, but there's no way to prevent tools vendors from adding 
their own usability layer around the base language, or improving these 
layers from one release to the next.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

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