Does it mean that an XQuery statement is essentially a well-formed
mixed-content XML fragment?
No, it only means that Xquery looks a little bit more like XML than it
did, so meaning that user errors due to confusion over the differences
will be slightly rarer and so more confusing as less expected.
Progress of a sort, I suppose.
Treatment of entity and character references in Xquery are still
going to make things fail in entertaining ways as it is still easy to
come up with a string of characters that parses as both XQuery and XML
but if you parse it as XML you get a different Xquery.
Basically XSLT as it uses a real XML parser expands all &... first
before the XSLT and XPath grammar get to play, but Xquery just tries to
merge the XML and Xpath grammars into a single pass which sometimes
gives the appearence of looking like XSLT but is really completely
different.
I bet I'm not the only one who's noticed
that the sometimes puzzling distinction in XSLT between the root *node*
and the root *element* means that XSLT would need no formal changes to
accept (multiple root-element)
It's not confusing if you refrain from calling the top level elemet the
root element and call it teh top level element, or document element or
something. XSLT1 spec is _explicit_ that such input is allowed (given a
parser that will generate such a thing).
David
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list