[xsl] leading : on qnames

Subject: [xsl] leading : on qnames
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 17:09:45 GMT
Mike Kay said (on xsl-list)

> The option of a leading colon on element names is there only for
> compatibility with XQuery, which does have reserved words. 

I think that the use of reserved words in a language designed to query
arbitrary XML documents is a rather strange design decision.

If Xquery decides that it wants to do that then the quoting mechanism
should be specified as part of Xquery not as part of Xpath so that it
does not affect other uses of Xpath.

The use of a : as the quote character seems particularly unfortunate
since it is already somewhat overloaded in its use in namespace prefixes
and axis specifiers, but whatever the character is, it ought to be in
the xquery specific part of the syntax.

David

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