Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Priscilla Walmsley's tutorial on XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 on XTech 2007

I attended today a full day tutorial given by Priscilla Walmsley's on XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 on XTech 2007.

It was fun!!

Priscella is a very nice person and a very good presenter.

I learned a lot from her presentation and from the answers she gave to my numerous questions. I actually used her suggestion to ask questions freely and indeed asked a lot of them.

I found her book on XML Schema very useful both for designing XML Schemas and for insight of various "dark corners" of the (sometimes though to understand) XML Schema recommendation. And now after attending her tutorial, I think that I'll go ahead and buy her newly published book on XQuery.

I had some good luck to find Eric van der Vlist and Priscella Walmsley chatting together during the lunch break today. So I stepped in and introduced myself (which was not hard given the fact the I spent all morning in her class...). I had a good chance of describing some of the grief I was having with questions about XML Schema and that the only references other than the (sometimes) cryptic w3c recommendation are their books on XML Schema and the xmlschema-dev mailing list. They agreed. Then I asked them a technical question related to the namespace="##local" in an xsd:any in an XML Schema with no defined targetNamespace and non-qualified globally defined elements. It was a breeze for them to answer, and they also reasoned why and when this is useful.

I hope that I'll be able to talk with these two nice people again in the remaining days of this conference.