Subject: [Simple] Last Call: draft-ietf-simple-xml-patch-ops (An Extensible Markup Language (XML) Patch Operations Framework Utilizing XML Path Language (XPath) Selectors) to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:19:21 -0400

The IESG has received a request from the SIP for Instant Messaging and 
Presence Leveraging Extensions WG (simple) to consider the following
document:

- 'An Extensible Markup Language (XML) Patch Operations Framework 
   Utilizing XML Path Language (XPath) Selectors '
   <draft-ietf-simple-xml-patch-ops-03.txt> as a Proposed Standard

The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
final comments on this action.  Please send substantive comments to the
[email-masked] mailing lists by 2007-09-25. Exceptionally, 
comments may be sent to [email-masked] instead. In either case, please 
retain the beginning of the Subject line to allow automated sorting.

The file can be obtained via
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-simple-xml-patch-ops-03.txt

IESG discussion can be tracked via
https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/pidtracker.cgi?command=view_id&dTag=14052&rfc_flag=0

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From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:10:10 +0200

On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 02:19:51PM +0200,
 Tom.Petch <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 135 lines which said:

> I question the use of XPath 1.0, when XPath 2.0 was approved at the
> start of this year. It seems short-sighted, a bit like choosing IPv4
> over IPv6

I strongly disagree. Xpath 2.0 is *much* more complicated than Xpath
1.0. Among free software, there is little implementation (or even
plans) of 2.0. Xpath 2.0 is quite controversial.

The comparison with IPv4/v6 is wrong. If you start from scratch, IPv6
is no more complicated than IPv4 (and it is probably the
opposite). Xpath 2.0 is always much more difficult to implement (for
instance, it requires schemas).

> This business of updating parts of an XML document seems to be
> cropping up in a number of places in the IETF with very different
> solutions.

AFAIK, this is the first one to be specified at IETF. Other contenders
are:

* REX (W3C), which uses DOM events http://www.w3.org/TR/rex/

* Xquery update (W3C) http://www.w3.org/TR/xqupdate/

* XUpdate, which seems completely dead
http://xmldb-org.sourceforge.net/xupdate/

* DUL, there was an I-D, "A delta format for XML documents",
draft-mouat-xml-patch-00.txt, now expired
http://sourceforge.net/projects/diffxml