[tmql-wg] Proposed new requirement: Ability to produce textual output

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Opinions on this?

* Robert Barta
| 
| Well, yes. :-)

Good! :)
 
| I think this is VERY useful, because it reduces the overlap of
| 
|   - querying ... getting a result in some form, and
|   - templating ... putting the content into a HTML page or whatever
| 
| We only would need XML, I reckon, so that the output can be
| posttransformed.

Well, that assumes the users will be happy to use both TMQL and XSLT
to get what they want, rather than use TMQL to produce it directly.
Producing non-XML output is actually quite common; I'm currently
involved in one project where the customer wants a straight text
output from the topic map, using indentation to indicate nesting.
 
| It would also be possible to create arbitrary text, but then I would
| expect some syntactic problems in TMQL.

I agree that that may be a concern, somewhat dependent on what syntax
we choose for this.

One question is whether we want this in TMQL part 1, or whether we
want it to be a separate part. That would give us:

 - part 1: querying
 - part 2: updates
 - part 3: output

Comments?

| PS: AsTMa? has this feature already: [...]

8^)

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >