>From another point of view, it's not possible to have *an* XML query
language because there are too many different ways that you might want
to access XML data: as nodes in groves ala SDQL, as full text using some
full-text index, as semantic-specific objects using some domain-specific
query mechanism, etc.
A language like SDQL coupled with an XML property set (that is, the
subset of the SGML property set needed to represent XML documents)
provides a complete set of operations for querying XML documents
represented as groves. These operations can be used either as
primitatives from which more specialized languages are created or as a
design spec that drives the development of a new syntax for expressing
the equivalent queries.
So my question is: is what is desired only a new *syntax* or is there a
requirement for a fundamentally different query mechanism? Or have I
entirely missed the point of the original question?
Cheers,
Eliot