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XqueryX currently uses a mixture of specific elements eg <xqx:forExpr> and generic elements modified via xsi:type eg <xqx:expr xsi:type="xqx:flworExpr"> It would be a lot more consistent (and a lot less ugly) if the need for xsi:type was removed and specific elements were added to cover all cases, so for example <xqx:flworExpr> XqueryX isn't intended for human consumption so perhaps uglyness will not be seen as a valid argument, so perhaps a more important reason is that using the Qname in an attribute value here makes it much harder to generate or process xqueryx with generic XML tools. Currently xqueryx is normatively defined via an xslt1 stylesheet that tests for <xsl:template match="xqx:expr[@xsi:type='xqx:flworExpr']"> This means that any tool generatng XqueryX _must_ use the xqx prefix here. Just being valid to the XSD schema is not enough. This is rather hard to arrange if the xqueryx document is being written using some generic xml-namespace/xml-schema processing pipeline which might have its own ideas about which prefixes to use for which namespaces. Conversely if the normative definition were changed from the current xslt1 string comparison to (say) an xslt2 schema-aware comparision of a Qname type attribute value then the prefixes could be arbitrary but it would be much harder to process XqueryX with an installed base of schema-unaware tools such as xslt1 or XSLT2-basic (or Xquery without schema support). If instead, you simply had to do a namespace aware comparision of element names, then pretty much any current XML processing application could handle xqueryx files. David
The XML Query Working Group has discussed this comment at some length and is sympathetic to making the sort of changes that you have suggested. A further comment will be added to this bug report when the actual changes have been worked out.
The Query WG agrees with your suggestion and has revised the XQueryX schema to eliminate the use of the <xqx:expr> element in XQueryX instance documents (in the schema, it remains as an abstract element). Those changes are still subject to review and change by the WG. When they are approved, another comment will be added to this thread. When, and if, the changes become visible to you, we hope that you will review them and mark this comment CLOSED.