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5/7/2002 2:21:11 PM, Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...> wrote:

>
>FWIW, I don't think the market is ready for one more XPath, in addition to 
>XQuery 1.0, XPath 1.0, and XPath 2.0. I would predict that an unofficial 
>XPath that is One More Spec to Read will probably be ignored in the long 
>run, much like SML. 

Interesting example ... I ran into Don Park at a recent web services event.  He said 
something like "Did you notice that every single example that our hosts put on the
screen today were legal SML?  No attributes, entities, CDATA sections, DTDs
at all."  

[Well, there were a lot of namespace declarations implied ... but they're not
really attributes anyway :~) ]

I wouldn't go as far as Don ... attributes and namespaces are used in the real world,
so I'd say that "Common XML Core" is the defacto standard profile of XML that
the overwhelming majority of realworld users stick to.  (Even if we exclude SOAP,
in which anything other than "Common XML Core" is illegal, I'm fairly sure
this is still true).

"The market" most certainly does accept unofficial subsets (oops, sorry
"interoperable profiles").  It even creates new "standards" to rationalize the  
profiles, as with XML (a profile of SGML), SOAP (a profile of XML) and what we're
seeing with the WS-I in the web services area.  

It's the 750-page "standards" that are generally ignored in the long run.

[actual counter-examples welcomed ...has any "standard" anywhere near as long
as XQuery / XPath2, except for one that exhaustively details existing
practice, been the basis for widespread interoperability ?  ]




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