[xquery-talk] Collections - family relationships

[Michael Kay]

On 17 Jan 2014, at 18:14, Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka at gmail.com> wrote:

> Continuing on the them of recreating the limitations of the physical world.
> 
> <xsl:apply-templates select="someNode"/>
> 
> where someNode does not exist in the document has no effect.
> 
> <xsl:apply-templates select="doc('somedoc'/someNode)
> 
> where somedoc doesn't exist .....error - failed to load document.
> 
> But really it's just another non-existent node.
> 

At the time the doc() function was introduced to XPath 2.0, there was several years' experience of the document() function, which had different error behaviour. The problems with this were well known and the design of the function pair doc-available() and doc() was designed to overcome these problems.

One difference between reading an external document and selecting a node is that reading an external document can fail for a great variety of reasons of which the absence of the document is only one. (It might exist but have incorrect permissions, or be ill-formed, or be schema-invalid, or the network might be down). In general if you can't read it you want to know why. Ttreating all these conditions in the same way would give no opportunity for error information. If you want to treat absence of the document as a non-error condition, doc-available enables you to do that (you can trivially write your own function that combines doc-available() and doc() to achieve the wanted effect).

So I would defend the current design.

But I would also question what you are trying to achieve by raising the question. When you use a programming language or function library, you can always find aspects of its design that could be improved, either for your particular use case or for the world at large. But 99% of the time you can achieve what you want, so what's the point of complaining? You know full well that the design isn't going to be improved in a subsequent release unless there's an issue that's a real stopper, because people expect backwards compatibility. It's like whinging about (say) the fact that XML doesn't treat form-feed as whitespace: there are bigger fish to fry, move on. If you feel you can do a better design job than this, then get involved, rather than shouting from the sidelines: there are plenty of standards activities that are short of contributors.

Michael Kay
Saxonica