Signs on the Sand

W3C has published fresh working drafts for XQuery/XPath/XSLT. XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language, XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0, XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model, XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators, XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization. These address comments received on previous drafts.

XQuery 1.0. What's new:

This working draft includes a number of changes made in response to comments received during the Last Call period that ended on Feb. 15, 2004. The working group is continuing to process these comments, and additional changes are expected. This document reflects decisions taken up to and including the face-to-face meeting in Redmond, WA during the week of August 23, 2004. These decisions are recorded in the Last Call issues list (http://www.w3.org/2004/10/xquery-issues.html). Some of these decisions may not yet have been made in this document. A list of changes introduced by this draft can be found in I Revision Log. The

Note:

A proposal that is currently under discussion would introduce a new form of type promotion, similar to numeric type promotion. Under this proposal, values of type xs:anyURI would be promotable to the type xs:string and could therefore be passed to functions such as fn:substring. One problem with this proposal is that values of type xs:anyURI are compared on a code-point basis, whereas values of type xs:string are compared using a collation. For this reason, promotion of xs:anyURI to xs:string might cause value comparison operators such as eq and gt to lose their transitive property. This proposal is pending further discussion and is not reflected in this document. However, the signatures of certain functions in [XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators], such as fn:doc and fn:QName, were written with the expectation that xs:anyURI would be promotable to xs:string. The signatures of these functions may change when this issue is resolved.