[xquery-talk] XQuery error codes and rewriting

[Michael Kay]

> Was it never considered to remove that paragraph altogether? 
> 
> I am sure that in that case some implementations will never be able to
> fully comply, but at least to me that seems preferable over what you
> have now.

There are one or two people on the working group who incline to this kind of
position, that when it comes to the complicated edge cases, it doesn't
matter what we say because implementors will do their own thing anyway. This
kind of thinking tends to come, I think, from people from the database
community where the expectations that products will conform 100% to SQL or
any other standard are historically quite low. On the whole, though, the
level of conformance of products in the XML space is much better, and if you
look at the core specs such as XML itself and XSLT, even the most minor
infringements of the spec give a product a lot of flak. For many of us
therefore, it's very important that the spec spells out exactly what is
allowed and what isn't, even if this sometimes means being more liberal than
one would like for 100% interoperability.

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