RE: [xml-dev] what's missing in XML? What's coming?

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

On Mon, 2012-01-02 at 13:20 -0500, David Lee wrote:

> > 1) A Standard (or well adopted convention) for Serialized XDM so that
> > programs may exchange XDM in addition to XML
> 
> I think (Rich Salz notwithstanding) EXI 2 may do this. Remains to be
> seen, but I hope so.

> Any reference to this ? 
Not yet; various xquery implementations have an xml serializtion of
course. Another approach might be to serialize an xquery expression
that, when evaluated, creates the right result, but then you get into
difficulties e.g. with base URIs.

> > 2) Better support for XDM in XQuery and XSLT to allow the input 'document'
> > to be any XDM value, and corresponding support in the implementations to
> > portably read such data (see #1)
> I'm not sure on the status of this; the first part is already there I
> think, unless you're asking for a further relaxing of constraints in the
> XDM - in which case please file a comment against the last call draft of
> the XDM 3.0 that was published in December; the Status section of the
> document has a link to the Bugzilla instance for doing that.
> 
> As for implementations - can you think of ways we could test it? if so,
> feel free to contribute tests, or to join the WG :-) or just to bug the
> vendors.
> 
> -----------
> 
> Again, any references ? I havent seen any hints of support for XDM as the
> input for XQuery or XSLT ...

The *purpose* of XDM is to be the input to XQuery and XSLT. They are
only defined to operate over XDM instances. I think I must not be
understanding you properly, sorry.

> (say a sequence ...)
> 
> Join the WG ... any suggestions on how to Join W3C unless my employeer has
> deep pockets ?

They don't need to be very deep. If your employer's business is in a W3C
area, they should be a Member already :-) If you are working at a
3-person company or XML isn't the organization's business, there are
other ways for you to contribute. The biggest costs for some of our
participations are a weekly teleconference call and travel to 2 or 3
meetings a year. The travel is generally optional.


> > 3) Adoption of the JSON Data model into XDM so that
> XPath/XSLT/XQuery/Schema
> > can be directly used on JSON data
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> > 
> > 4) A standard/convention for JSON / XDM conversions  to allow #1 as  both
> > input and output.
> 
> Not sure if this is premature, but it may fall under your No, 3 above.
I.e. if XDM is extended to support JSON (e.g. with maps and arrays) then
the rest should follow; see e.g. the jsoniq proposal for one idea.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/