XQuery: The XML Query Language

Chapter 12. XQuery Serialization

Introduction

When working with XQuery, two different serialization issues arise, and in this chapter we contend with both of them.

The first is how to serialize the results of an XQuery as XML. This is difficult because the XQuery Data Model is larger than XML itself; for example, an XQuery can result in two documents, or a list of attributes and numbers, none of which are directly serializable as XML. This is known as XQuery Serialization.

The second issue is how to represent the query itself using XML. Representing query expressions as XML allows them to be manipulated using XQuery itself. This XML syntax is known as XQueryX.

At the time of this writing, neither of these serialization formats has solidified. XQuery ...