On upcoming System.Xml 2.0 changes

Improved mcs /doc support patch

I had left my /doc patch as broken for a cpl months. But since there are many voices of need, I decided to fix and improve it. Here is the latest patch am working on. I'll post it when I finished remaining warning stuff (thanks again to Marek for the list).

On upcoming System.Xml 2.0 changes

http://blogs.msdn.com/DareObasanjo/archive/2004/10/13/241591.aspx

In short, it is nice.

So now XQuery is being removed. No wonder. Apparently, XQuery won't become W3C REC until .NET 2.0 gets out. It is a good decision that Microsoft dropped XQuery from their forthcoming .NET FX, despite being regarded as "now XML 2.0 is not so fantastic". But just imagine; we know how MSXML brought confusion wrt http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl, and we - well, at least I - don't want another disaster.

Actually besides the progress of the spec, even with the latest working draft, there are some difficulty on current .NET XQuery implementation strategy that premises the unity of CLR and XQuery datatypes. For example, with xs:gYearMonth mapped to System.DateTime, you can't implement XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators section 17. Casting. It also applies to conversion between xs:QName and xs:NOTATION (both are represented as XmlQualifiedName, while those types differ in casting to xs:string and xdt:untypedAtomic (it can be avoided by making derived class for xs:NOTATION though).

Other than XQuery, there seems some nice improvements. For example, XPathDocument is no longer editable (it makes sense very much), XmlReader.Create() supports XmlParserContext (maybe like I thought that we need something like IXmlParserContext), and so on. Am especially interested in XmlSchemaValidator that might help people creating validating XML editor. I have no idea what it is like, but it sounds cool.

Oh, BTW it does not mean that our XQuery implementation will be totally discarded. Well, it will disappear from System.Xml.dll (and less important but from System.Data.SqlXml.dll too), but it might be extracted into another library. ATM, it cannot handle positional predicates, sequence type matchings, many XQuery functions, and more, but it can already handle some of the queries from XQuery Use Cases (you will need some special XmlResolver to handle those nonexisting document instances though).