Anyone wanna speculate about what this means?

[Mike Champion <mc@xegesis.org>]

In 
http://www.fawcette.com/xmlmag/2003_02/magazine/columns/endtag/default.asp 
Adam Bosworth says:

"It is the thesis of this series of articles that [DOM/JDOM, 
SAX/databinding, and XSLT] are only rarely suitable for either waypoint 
[lossless transformation] or endpoint [lossy data extraction] processing. 
As I wrote in the prior article, they place an intolerable burden on the 
developer. Two exciting new technologies, extensions to JavaScript for 
native processing of XML (coming up through the aegis of ECMAScript) and 
XML Query (from the W3C), can vastly improve performance and productivity 
for this sort of programming. "

Two questions:

- Is there anything publicly available on the "extensions to JavaScript for 
native processing of XML"?  I haven't heard of it, and Googleing didn't 
turn up anything useful.

- Anyone want to speculate on why  one might think that XQuery will be 
vastly better than these other technologies for XML transformations, lossy 
or otherwise?  Technically, they are all more or less equivalent (assuming 
one has an XPath library to find patterns in the XML).  As far as 
productivity is concerned, I would guess that it depends ... some people 
are productive with procedural code and a generic Infoset-ish data model, 
some are productive with building a customized object model from the XML 
tokens and manipulating it, and some are comfortable with XSLT's 
declarative template/transformation model.  XQuery is one more approach 
that some people are going to like (perhaps it will make XML streams look 
like a good ol' database for SQL programmers), but I'm not aware of any 
arguments that it will dramatically improve productivity or performance.

Thoughts, anyone?  Or are we just being setup for a marketing pitch?

-- 
Mike Champion