& XSLT An excellent question, John. I wonder to what extent Xpath 2 might
suffice for at least most of that decision.

When referring to it while composing this email, I just noticed it went
to full REC on 1/23 -- congratulations to all who have been
involved!!!!! This was a boatload of work, and speaking as a
prior-but-no-longer editor, I think it is quite a good job.

I think most of the exslt functionality that would fall on the xpath
side, is probably covered by Xpath 2 (see the functions and operators
REC at http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery-operators/). So John, might I modify
your question to: 

   "What exslt functionality is both (a) needed in Xpath applications
other than just XSLT, and 
   (b) is not covered by Xpath 2?"

For me, some of the most important additions in general include:

op:is-same-node, op:node-before, op:node-after
op:concatenate, fn:index-of, fn:exists, fn:distinct-values (directly
applies to the problem you described at the start of this thread),
fn:subsequence,
fn:deep-equal, op:union, op:intersect, op:except (thank you, thank you,
thank you!)
op:to (can be used to simplify the $distance arg of your case)
string-join, normalize-unicode, upper-case, lower-case
all the regex functions, esp. tokenize

Most of these correspond closely to exslt functionality....

Steve
 

>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: "John L. Clark" [mailto:jlc6@[...].edu] 
>  Sent: Saturday, January 27, 2007 9:35 PM
>  To: list@[...].org
>  Subject: [exslt] Re: Proposal: has-name-match()
>  
>  All,
>  
>  After reading the responses to my most recent proposal, I 
>  agree that my proposal was too specific to be generally 
>  useful, and in the context of XSLT it is trivial.  I'm sorry 
>  for the noise, but I'm glad for the feedback; thanks for 
>  keeping me humble.  I was focused on some problems that I was 
>  having with (limitations within) XForms at the time.
>  
>  I think this may raise a more interesting and general 
>  question.  How should the community deal with the needs of 
>  host languages (for XPath) other than XSLT?  XPath was 
>  originally designed for use with XSLT, but it has proven to 
>  be a (very) useful language for any application that needs to 
>  ask questions of an XML document.  We're now seeing it in 
>  other XML host languages like XForms as well as in XML 
>  libraries for a broad range of general-purpose programming 
>  languages.  Even in these non-XSLT contexts, I see a useful 
>  and sensible proliferation of EXSLT extension functions, 
>  although clearly not the extension elements.  To what degree 
>  is EXSLT really EXPath in spirit, and where do we draw the 
>  line on how powerful we allow XPath to become through extensions?
>  Should we identify which, if any, extension functions are 
>  only intended for use when the host language is XSLT?  Do we 
>  want to say anything about when the host language is not XSLT?
>  
>  Take care,
>  
>      John L. Clark
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