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Re: Hello XQuery ... Goodbye XSLT?

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Hello XQuery ... Goodbye XSLT?
• From: <michael.h.kay@n...>
• Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 18:18:04 +0000

>From my examinations, it would appear that XQuery is a >superset of XSLT.  I wonder about the future of XSLT? 
 
That seems a very surprising conclusion to come to. I would have said XQuery 1.0 is XSLT 2.0 minus template rules, grouping, analyze-string, format-number, format-date, keys, generate-id, unparsed-text and a few other things besides.

True, XQuery has a more composable syntax and thus avoids some of the duplication that XSLT has between the XSLT and XPath levels of the language, and it's less verbose. But in terms of functionality, there is only one small feature in XQuery that's not available in XSLT, namely the ability in ORDER BY to sort on a criterion that isn't a function of the items being sorted, and I don't think many XSLT users have asked for that.

It's the fact that XQuery is a subset of XSLT that makes it suitable as an XML query language as distinct from a transformation language, so this isn't intended to knock it.

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

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