Inspirational Technology

Editors' Newswire for 8 May, 2003

Newswire stories, including: Dave Pawson on XPath 2.0. [xmlhack]

Lots of complaining about the infection of XPath 2.0 by the XQuery working group. I fear we're going to be stuck with XML 1.0, XPath 1.0 and XSL-T 1.0 as everything coming after is to put it simply, scary.

I guess I'm adopting the perspective that as soon as W3C XML Schema touches something, it's doomed to whither on the vine. This is really too bad, XML is a tremendous tool, but its benefit is supposed to be simplicity. Using anything that W3C XML Schema has touched is just not simple.

Well formed XML is the useful core. You shouldn't have to pull in all that schema machinery to run an XPath against a well formed document. It will just bloat the size of implementations, books and headaches for little benefit. Schema support could have easily been partitioned out of the core of XPath 2.0 where it could fester and die from lack of real interest. Now the whole of XPath 2.0 will suffer that ignominious fate until someone defines an interoperable subset that jettisons all the schema garbage.

W3C XML Schema: Just Say NO!