XML-QL

Don Park donpark at quake.net
Wed Sep 2 15:05:54 BST 1998


>Henry I am a little confused about perceiving XSL as a query language.
>
>It was my understanding that it aims to be a transformation language,
>like DSSSL, that works with a query or scripting language to
>transform/process and format data.
>
>Am I confused again :-)?


No.  XSL is definitely not a query language although it uses ideas which
could be useful for querying.

What I am concerned about is the obsession with thinking about XML as a
'thing'.  I think it is much more interesting to think of XML as a language
of communication.

When we are talking about XML query language, are we talking about
expressing a query in XML or are we talking about an expression, not
necessarily in XML, that will return information from data sources, not
necessarily XML document repositories, in XML format?

What we have is a multitude of needs and I think we need to sort out which
of them address before we unintentionally drop XQL into Wired Hot/Cold list.

BTW, there is another topic related to XML-QL which is XBE or
XML-[query]-By-Example.  I am not sure if anyone is working on it because I
just thought of it <g>.  You just write an example of the XML document you
want by specifying the tags as you want it and fill in the values to match.
XBE engine uses it to return the data the way you want exactly, rejecting
mismatches and weeding out unwanted information.

Don



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