E4X and XQuery

[Brett Zamir]

  Although we were talking about a lack of interest in XML in the web 
community, I found it rather heartening to see some good  participation 
in the interest of bringing E4X support to Chrome's V8 engine (as E4X is 
already in Firefox), with the intention of getting critical mass to lead 
to adoption by the other browsers. V8 has indicated in theory their 
willingness to integrate good code, as long as it is produced by a 
third-party: http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=235#c19 
Several there have already mentioned being willing to donate to try to 
make it happen, including with the hope that if more browsers besides 
Mozilla support E4X, there may be potential to see it become standard 
across browsers.

What's the connection to XQuery?

As both I and Rob Koberg have now mentioned, jQuery comes close to 
simulating XQuery in some regards, and with E4X in the picture, this 
becomes even more possible.

While those familiar with E4X know that it can evaluate expressions to 
produce dynamic XML content, they might not have given thought to 
simulating XQuery-like features.

I started a wiki page earlier on how JavaScript functions can be used 
with E4X to simulate iterating loops or sorting inside XML content, 
using inline functions to allow multi-line statements inside literals, 
or other template-like and XQuery-like syntax: 
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/E4X_for_templating .

Brett