Re: [xml-dev] Modern talking

[Giuseppe Celano <celano@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>]

Dear Reichardt,

XQuery is different from XSLT. Of course everything depends on your specific needs/tasks, but
probably you could solve most of them with, for example, BaseX XQuery: it provides 
extensions to the W3C recommendations, which make it a general-purpose programming language.

Best,
Giuseppe

Universität Leipzig
Institute of Computer Science, Digital Humanities
Augustusplatz 10
04109 Leipzig
Deutschland
E-mail: celano@informatik.uni-leipzig.de
E-mail: giuseppegacelano@gmail.com
Web site 1: http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/team/
Web site 2: https://sites.google.com/site/giuseppegacelano/

> On Aug 29, 2017, at 7:04 PM, u123724 <u123724@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I don't have a stake in XQuery but as a practioner working not just
> with markup yet still with enough XSLT experience I've found
> XML-specific programming languages generally limiting in that problem
> domains I'm using them for would often benefit from the kind of
> infrastructure and mindshare that general-purpose programming
> languages have, such as APIs for database and network access, unit
> testing, etc.
> 
> From my utilitarian perspective, XSLT's (and supposedly XQuery's) wins
> over general-purpose language where literal XML content with
> small-scale variable/expression expansions needs to be produced from
> input. OTOH, the more an XSLT program makes use of complex and/or
> dynamic expressions to construct output markup, the more other
> language options become attractive.
> 
> I'd also agree that RDF or other logic-oriented formalisms are the way
> to go for "uniform data models". Encoding child, attribute,
> following-sibling, etc. axes as logical clauses is straightforward,
> and in fact part of XPath specs anyway AFAIK. Axioms for tree-ness
> could similarly be defined. Using Prolog would then give you a more
> general query language eg. rather than XPath conjunctive path query
> 
>    P/child::*/attribute::*
> 
> you could use the more general form
> 
>    child(P,C), attribute(C,A)
> 
> though Prolog also lets you define variable-free syntaxes for CPQs.
> 
> Moreover, Prolog generalizes XSLT's pattern matching into unification,
> and allows rules/templates just like XSLT (though not with implicit
> priorities). Outside of the RDF bubble, there's ISO Topic Maps with
> the "tolog" profille of Prolog to query ontology data.
> 
> M. Reichardt
> sgmljs.net
> 
> On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 5:22 PM, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, 2017-08-29 at 12:19 +0200, Giuseppe Celano wrote:
>>> 
>>> And yes, XQuery is tied to XML, but the problem here is, in my
>>> experience, not XML, but the huge amount of misinformation
>>> circulating about it (stemming from ignorance of it), misuse of it,
>>> and laziness: if one persists in trying to handle XML without
>>> XPath/XQuery/XSLT, I can understand why they ended up hating it.
>> 
>> I regret not pressing harder to push the Working Group to rename XQuery
>> to FastForest and to refer to databases as forest stores. My purpose
>> was to head off the ideas that the database must load the XML text
>> files every time there's a query and to emphasize that they can be
>> really fast.
>> 
>> --
>> Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
>> Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, XQuery WG
>> 
>> Web slave for http://www.fromoldbooks.org/
>> 
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