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Bug 3221 - Terminology: "value"
Summary: Terminology: "value"
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: XML Schema
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Datatypes: XSD Part 2 (show other bugs)
Version: 1.1 only
Hardware: PC Windows XP
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
QA Contact: XML Schema comments list
URL:
Whiteboard: medium, easy
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2006-05-09 09:33 UTC by Michael Kay
Modified: 2007-10-12 16:53 UTC (History)
0 users

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Description Michael Kay 2006-05-09 09:33:33 UTC
QT-approved comment.

Section 2.1. It is worth noting that the word "value" has different
meanings in Schema and in QT. This gives QT some terminology problems: a QT
atomic value is a pair comprising an SV and a type, where an SV is a "value"
as defined in XML Schema; but QT has no name for the concept, having used
"value" for something else. This sometimes leads to circumlocutions such as "a point in the value space". A more distinctive term, such as "datapoint",
might be worth considering.
Comment 1 David Ezell 2007-08-24 20:58:31 UTC
On the telcon.
For bug 3221, not only would it be difficult to change in our own specification, there is too much other material out there that already uses the term in the context of schemas. 

Sorry, but the WG declines.

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Comment 2 C. M. Sperberg-McQueen 2007-09-17 20:28:39 UTC
Owing to travel, I was absent when this issue on the usage of the 
term "value" was discussed.  

Had I been present on the call, I think I would have argued that the premise 
of the comment may need discussion or clarification.  The text of the spec 
does not make it very explicit (perhaps it should do so), but over time, the
XML Schema WG has come to agree that the best way to interpret the XSDL
spec is to assume that given any value, one necessarily is also given the
identity of its primitive datatype.  So that one knows, given a sequence of
bits, whether it is a value of type xs:hexBinary or of xs:base64Binary. 
This seems in many ways analogous to the idea in the QT specs that when 
given a value, one knows what type it has.  The difference is that XSDL
assumes one knows the primitive datatype, while in QT one knows the
governing type definition (or the active member type definition.  

But it is true that XSDL regards the identity of the primitive type
as just a property of the value, rather than talking about pairs
whose one member is the name of a type and whose other is the 'value' 
qua datapoint within the value space of that type.

It would probably be worth while, both in XSDL and in the relevant
QT specs, to point to this difference in usage and to point out that
the difference in viewpoint is not, in practice, all that great.
Comment 3 Michael Kay 2007-10-12 16:53:27 UTC
QT accept that aligning the terminology in this area is going to be too difficult.