At 3:35 AM +0000 3/21/02, James Strachan wrote: >After looking at XPath 2.0 which introduces XSD types, maybe we should >return java.lang.Number again? >
No, XPath 2.0 is huge, not done anytime soon, and from Jaxen's perspective a major change. Do not expect that you'll be able to make a few changes here and there and have Jaxen work with XPath 2.0. You're going to need to redesign most of the API. I would pay absolutely no attention to XPath 2.0 for the time being. Focus on making a complete 1.0 implementation which is useful in and of itself. In fact, for Java developers I think XPath 1.0 is a much better fit than XPath 2.0. The complications in XPath 2.0 are mostly due to the needs of XQuery and XSLT 2.0. There are a few nice features for Java programs (the ability to specify the default namespace for use in XPath expressions would be convenient) but nothing we can't live without. Later you may want to design a separate XPath 2.0 API, but it won't be at all the same thing. For example, in the case at hand, XPath 2.0 has no number type as such. Thus there should not be a numberValueOf method. Instead there are separate and related decimal, double, float, int, byte, short, long, Integer, nonNegativeInteger, nonPositiveInteger, positiveInteger, negativeInteger, and probably a few others I've forgotten. There are much more serious differences too. The most important is probably that the whole model is based on sequences rather than the four fundamental XPath 1.0 types. Sequences can contain nodes or primitive types, and as you noticed the types are not the same in XPath 2.0. Sequences are ordered and can contain duplicates. Whereas an XPath 1.0 expression might return a node-set, an XPath 2.0 expression might return a sequence containing both nodes and non-nodes. I just don't think you're going to be able to reconcile an XPath 1.0 API with an XPath 2.0 API. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ _______________________________________________ Jaxen-interest mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jaxen-interest
