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Michael Kay wrote: > XQuery is not a big language. It is arguably smaller than XSLT 1.0. The argument for that proposition would be more than a little jesuitical. The only way you could claim that would be by ignoring the complexity of XPath 2.0 vs. XPath 1.0, and since XPath 2.0 is a necessary part of XQuery and XPath 1.0 is a necessary part of XSLT 1.0, I don;t think that's fair. A conformant implementation of XQuery 1.0 would be immensely bigger than a conformant implementation of XSLT 1.0. At one point I would have said XQuery 1.0/XSLT 2.0 was conceptually simpler than XSLT 1.0 based mostly on the differences between sequences and node-sets/result tree fragments. Unfortunately, the working group started making exceptions to the clear and practical sequence logic in the name of performance, and therefore thoroughly muddied what had been a exemplar of clarity to the point where I can no longer be sure whether any function will work with any particular data type without reference to the spec. Thus the conceptual framework no longer seems simpler and clearer to me. :-( -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@m... XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim
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