I spent a morning debugging a problem that I have now boiled down to this test case. The following query prints 3097:
<html>
{
let $num := count(collection("/db/quotes")/quote)
return $num
}
</html>
and this query prints 0:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
{
let $num := count(collection("/db/quotes")/quote)
return $num
}
</html>
The only difference is the default namespace declaration. In the
documents being queried the quote elements are indeed in no namespace.
Much to my surprise XQuery has broken the
semantics of XPath 1.0 by
applying default namespaces to
unqualified names in path expressions.
Who thought it would
be a good idea to break practice with XSLT, every single XPath
implementation on the planet, and years of experience and
documentation?
There's an argument to be made for default namespaces applying in path
expressions, but the time for that argument to be made was 1998. Once
the choice was made, the cost of switching was far higher than any
incremental improvement you might make. Stare decisis isn't just for
the supreme court.
