> well it depends for simple cases its easy enough to write a 
> recursive function, essentially implementing apply-templates 
> by hand

XQuery doesn't have any dynamic despatch mechanism so you can't emulate
apply-templates precisely. The caller has to know whom to call. That means
that the logic of your code is closely tied to the structure of your data in
a way that needn't happen with XSLT.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/