XQuery Formal Semantics in Last Call
Among all the TechEd focus, I almost forgot to point out that the Formal Semantics of XQuery is now also in Last Call. The comment period will close on July 15th. Since the document is large and quite formal, I recommend those that are interested in the static semantics and the formal underpinnings of XQuery to start reading now :-). As for the other documents, please use the Bugzilla reporting tool to file your comments.
The working group also republished the requirements documents for XQuery, XPath and the XQuery update facility (mainly to update the IP disclosure requirements on the requirement docs).
On the other documents, we have received a fair number of comments, but fortunately not as many as in the first last call phase. I also filed a couple on behalf of my developers and users. On the two technical issues that I mentioned in my earlier posting, the situation is:
- Specification of encoding on an XQuery document:
The optional encoding specification will be kept, but XQuery parsers that have other means to determine the code page/encoding of the query expression can disregard it. This seems like an acceptable compromise.
- UntypedAtomic handling of value comparisons (eq, le et al.):
Here the discussion is still ongoing. I have an action item to write a detailed change proposal to show how I would implement my proposed rules.