XQuery from the Experts: A Guide to the W3C XML Query Language

Chapter 2. Influences on the Design of XQuery

Don Chamberlin

The emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s was a seminal event in human culture. Suddenly, as if overnight, a significant fraction of the world's computers were connected, not only by a physical network but also by a common protocol for exchanging information. The Web offered an unprecedented opportunity to make information truly ubiquitous. It seemed to promise that people would no longer need to move physically to places and times where information was available, since all information would be everywhere, all the time.

Realizing this promise required some organizing principle for the exchange of information. This principle had to be independent of any particular language or ...