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Four sections in the XQuery 1.0 spec: 3.7.1.1 Attributes 3.7.3.2 Computed Attribute Constructors 3.7.3.5 Computed Processing Instruction Constructors 3.7.3.6 Computed Comment Constructors have substantially the same chunk of text, for converting an XDM sequence into a string value: 1. Atomization is applied to the [input], converting it to a sequence of atomic values. 2. If the result of atomization is an empty sequence, the [output] is the zero-length string. Otherwise, each atomic value in the atomized sequence is cast into a string. 3. The individual strings resulting from the previous step are merged into a single string by concatenating them with a single space character between each pair. The resulting string [is the output]. Could these be abstracted into a single concept/process for 1.1?
For information, XSLT 2.0 collects these up into a a single procedure described at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#constructing-simple-content The XSLT procedure is slightly different from the XQuery procedure, in that it discards zero-length text nodes and merges adjacent text nodes before atomizing. This is largely to ensure that XSLT 2.0 behaves in the same way as 1.0.
This would absolutely be an improvement.
The WG decided to leave this to the discretion of the editor. This change is purely editorial.