[xquery-talk] xsi:type typing support

Michael Kay mhk at mhk.me.uk
Sun Mar 13 16:37:18 PST 2005


> Sorry Mike, I don't understand what you're saying. I'm just 
> checking to see
> if an xsi:type attribute of value "xs:int" has been declared on every
> <number> element. If that's the case, then I consider them 
> sortable as ints.
> What am I missing?

The fact that the user could quite legitimately expect xsi:type="xsd:int" to
be equivalent, if the prefix xsd is assigned to the relevant URI.

You could of course to a proper QName comparison by calling the appropriate
function to expand the QName; but it seems odd to do this kind of
manipulation for the xsi:type attribute just so that you don't have to do it
for the content of the element.

(The user might also legitimately expect xsi:type="xs:short" to work, since
it should be OK to use a subtype in place of its parent type. This is a
separate problem with the approach.)

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/




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