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Re: XSLT/XPath 2.0 (was "Identifying two tags...")


Hi Sara,

> Personally, I've been hesitating for close to year about whether
> moving from DTDs to Schemas really buys me anything. It's obviously
> more consistent, has some really nice mechanism for 'specialization'
> and a few (read that as less than 6) data types that could be useful
> in a minor way.
>
> But the cost is pretty steep. The language is longer and more
> complex. Plus, I have to use namespaces even if I don't need them.

You shouldn't (though perhaps you've been trying with an
implementation that limits you to using schemas with namespaces). If
you leave off the targetNamespace attribute of xs:schema, then you
create a schema for a markup language with no namespace, which sounds
like what you want.

> And Schemas completely ignored the issue of entity declarations for
> characters or strings within the local document which is a *big*
> deal for people on the document side. This does not add up to "the
> cornerstone of XML technology" in my book.

Entities are a difficult problem because an XML document that doesn't
have a DTD to define the entities that it uses wouldn't be a
well-formed XML document. There's no point having to define them in
the schema if you have to define them in the DTD as well. If you did
go the XML Schema route, you should divide your DTD into the physical
model (entities), and the logical model (element/attribute
declarations); it's the logical model that can become a schema.

> So, if I don't move to schemas which is likely, what has the wait
> for XSLT 2.0 bought me? Over a year's worth of wait for
> functionality that was proposed for version 1.1, based on real
> implementation issues from the user community, to make 2.0
> compatible with Schemas which I don't need. And a very clear
> addition of complexity (compare the number of pages in the specs)
> that again doesn't buy me much.
>
> I realize that I am a minority. But I was a considered minority in
> the user world for XML 1.0. It's call for simplicity was partially
> about people like me. And the complexity that is creeping up within
> XML, XSLT, and XPath concerns me also.

I don't think that you are in the minority in terms of being impatient
for a version of XSLT with the benefits that we thought we were going
to get a year ago. Nor do I think you are in the minority in terms of
being concerned about the complexity of the new WDs and the amount
that it appears we'll have to learn in order to understand them. It's
good to raise those concerns now, while the WGs are still considering
which parts of, for example, XPath 2.0 are really necessary. I
encourage you, and indeed everyone, to write to
public-qt-comments@w3.org describing what parts you find particularly
hard to understand and which parts you think are unnecessary.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


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