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"Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@n...> writes: > XML has a clear story on hierarchical relationships, but a very confused > story on those that aren't hierarchical. There are lots of ways of doing it: > URIs, IDREFs, XLinks, or just "unmarked" foreign keys. None of these is > clearly definitive. Moreover, XML forces you to treat one particular > relationship (the parent-child relationship) very differently from all the > other relationships, so you have to make an early design decision that won't > necessarily be convenient for everyone for all time. This would seem to undermine your assertion that XML query languages prove that declarative languages work for (XML) hierarchical databases. Unless there is something in XQuery that makes navigating these secondary relationships as easy as following an XPath, it seems to me that XML query languages neither prove nor disprove that assertion. Ari. -- Elections only count as free and trials as fair if you can lose money betting on the outcome.
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