Talk:XQuery

Purpose of XQuery

I feel the description of the purpose of XQuery misses the point. While you can use XQuery on a single XML document, the main intended use is to search through collections, e.g. databases, of XML documents, analogous to SQL for RDBMSs.

From the W3C site: "The mission of the XML Query project is to provide flexible query facilities to extract data from real and virtual documents on the World Wide Web, therefore finally providing the needed interaction between the Web world and the database world. Ultimately, collections of XML files will be accessed like databases. "

The view that this article conveys is understandible given that current tutorials often assume a single document as the student is likely to be using a command line processor against a sample file. This creates the impression that XQuery is a weird form of XSLT. I believe that XSLT is a better fit for problems of transforming XML files and that the justification for XQuery is that it allows processors to optimise the search across a collection of XML documents. — 11:02, 4 August 2004 193.120.126.114