Re: XQuery basics

2008/6/4 Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> "Is XQuery like XSLT such that I have to build a little
>> script that will copy everything from the source to the
>> destination and make the change or add the attribute once I
>> get to it?"
>>
>> In that sense the two are different aren't they...? XSLT's
>> recursive descent processing model makes it ideal for the
>> task, while in XQuery you would pretty much require XQuery
>> Update to do the same task.
>
> Yes. XQuery tends to work better when you want to extract a small amount of
> information from a large document and ignore the rest. XSLT tends to work
> better if you want to keep most things the same and make a few small
> changes. Of course there's a range of tasks between those extremes.

I reckon a future architecture is going to be standalone transforms
calling XQuery to get input - if a standard name for the initial
template can be settled on (for example "main") then you could point
your browser at whatever.xslt and the transform can be executed server
side fetching input from a variety of sources and constructing the
page, both languages working to their strengths.

Pretty much exactly how eXist works now with XQuery, but using a
standalone transform as the entry point.  I've mentioned it to
Wolfgang so hopefully a future version might support it...

-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com
Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/