Re: [xml-dev] Should the XPath working group add support for animport ca

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

On Mon, 2013-01-14 at 14:11 +0000, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> The new functionality in XPath 3.0 is very exciting.
> 
> With its new functionality one can create powerful XPath data
> structures, functions (unfortunately not libraries, see below) and
> programs -- all written in pure XPath. 

Roger...

First a minor nit: there's no XPath Working Group - XPath is an
expresison language intended to be incorporated into or called from a
"host" language, and is used in XPointer/XLink, XSLT, XQuery, Schema,
XForms and elsewhere; it's developed jointly by the XSLT and XQuery
Working Groups at w3C.

A bigger nit: if you start writing programs in XPath you'll start
needing things that are not part of XPath. For example, you can't easily
process XML documents with XPath if they are not in the default
namespace, since XPath provides no way to bind a prefix to a namespace
URI.

If you just want to store XPath expressions in a content management
system and re-use them, that does not involve extending XPath, but using
a macro-preprocessor; you could use XML entities and/or XSLT to do it,
for example, generating either XSLT or XQuery as appropriate.

A lot of people might have keen interest in such a thing.

I for one would rather see people use XQuery if they want a more
powerful XPath, and would actually like to see a future conformance
level for XPath that's little more than XPath 1 updated to work with XDM
and sequences.

Best,

Liam

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