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

Conclusion

In this chapter we have looked at the relation between XQuery and XSLT (and their common subset, XPath) from a number of perspectives. We began with an analysis of the areas of similarity and difference between the two languages and the reasons why the differences occur. We saw that although there are large areas of overlapping functionality, significant differences exist in the requirements that the two languages were designed to meet, and that we can trace many of the design differences to the fact that the two languages were intended to be used in different environments. Other differences, however, reflect the different cultures of the document world, with its SGML history, and the database world, with its traditions based on SQL. ...