Date: Nov. 19, 1998
Link: http://www.w3.org/TandS/QL/QL98/pp/oracle.html
Source Author or Organization: David Beech, Oracle Corporation

Excerpted from "Simplicity and Commonality" and "Scope" sections: "We hope to see high priority given to simplicity of concepts and exploitation of commonality. The success of the Web as a whole owes much to these virtues, and XML is a simplification of SGML which promises to find a wide range of applicability. Likewise in the query language world, the simplicity of the relational model and the range of applicability of its query concepts have been paramount in its widespread adoption. It would be ironic indeed if in attempting to bring together these fields, we lost sight of the key reasons for their successes."

"The semantics of a query language for XML should ideally span the complete range from querying a single document (as in XSL usage) to querying vast collections of XML documents, since there is no sharp dividing line in the spectrum, and no apparent technical obstacle to using a common semantic model. Users benefit from ease of learning and use, and vendors benefit from focusing technology development on a single model."