[xquery-talk] Constructing namespace nodes
Michael Kay
mike at saxonica.com
Sun Feb 6 20:12:30 PST 2011
> I suggest you make your case to the W3C committee to convince them
> that the namespace axis and namespace nodes are first-class parts of
> the XPath model and should, therefore, be accessible in XQuery. I
> haven't heard why XQuery explicitly chose to make the namespace axis
> unaccessible, rather than making it optional so that some XQuery
> engines could support it if they wanted to.
>
XQuery 3.0 has the somewhat odd situation that namespace nodes can now
be dynamically created and added to elements, but they still cannot be
retrived via the namespace axis. There's strong opposition to the
namespace axis from some members of the XQuery WG who still seem to
believe that it's conceptually complex and/or that supporting it will
cause inefficiency. For retrieving namespaces, the functions
in-scope-prefixes() and namespace-uri-for-prefix() do provide adequate
functionality.
There is one valid criticism of the "namespace node" data model, which
is that it doesn't work well with XQuery Updates. For retrieval, asking
about in-scope namespaces makes sense. But when you're dealing with
updates, the idea of adding or deleting a single namespace declaration
does seem rather simpler than adding or deleting hundreds of namespace
nodes.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
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