Re: XQuery basics

2008/6/6 Robert Koberg <rob@xxxxxxxxxx>:

I was kind of joking with Andrew (perhaps my smiley was not enough to
indicate that). Andrew wants a way to use XSL files like some folk
use JSP or PHP (or in the case of eXist and others, XQuery). I don't
think it is a good idea from a memory (as Michael Kay reaffirmed in
his post on this thread) and functionality standpoint.

How isn't it a good idea from a functionality point of view... what
language is better than XSLT at creating markup?

Wouldn't you just end up spending a lot of work on extending XSLT to do
what its host languages - Java, Perl, PHP, all proven to work in the
application server by years of experience and development - already do?
It's not only about mark-up, but about so many other things - including
dealing with non-XML data.

Just think about the case of people insisting to generate CSV via, of
all tools, XSLT. While I do not doubt it can be done I wonder if it's
worth the effort when the solution is already at hand in the form of
your preferred general-purpose programming language.

Standalone schema-aware transforms, generating strict xhtml by
transforming xml returned from various queries (where the xslt, xml,
and xquery are all stored in the same database) could well be the most
common use of 2.0 in the future.