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

Convergence: XPath 2.0

During the twelve months after XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0 were published, it became increasingly clear that XQuery could not ignore them. All the major vendors were shipping implementations, and there was a high level of uptake by the user community. Unlike some other standards organizations, W3C likes to keep its specifications consistent and coherent: It does not like overlaps and duplications between different recommendations that offer multiple solutions to the same problem. So XQuery quickly aligned itself with XPath, adopting path expressions as part of the XQuery language that were strongly aligned with the XPath specification, though initially there were many differences in the detailed syntax and semantics (as well ...