Evan Lenz wrote:
> So maybe someone has tried to implement something
> like XSLT's template rules over a large data set,
> and they've never succeeded in producing a scalable
> result. I'm still sad to see it thrown out so early.
> It seems too early.
Hi Evan,
Nobody is throwing XSLT out. XSLT will live a long and happy life. So will XQuery. They were designed for different purposes.
Remember a few years ago when people were saying that the functionality of XSLT had too much overlap with the functionality of the DOM? Some were even calling for the W3C to stop work on XSLT. That would have been a stupid mistake, just as stupid as calling for XQuery to stop because it has overlap with XSLT.
One of the purposes for which XQuery is designed is scalability. It may be possible, post hoc, to achieve scalability in XSLT for large repositories, but we can't count on it. Regardless, I think that a lot of day-to-day database queries are more straightforward in XQuery. In fact, when I compare the examples in your paper, the XQuery examples really do look easier to read, write, and optimize than the XSLT equivalents you suggest.
Jonathan