>
> One more question ...  in practice  are you going to have to write
> procedural  code to handle the complex and messy real-world
> transformations anyway?

Michael,

I hope  NOT. That's what XQuery and XSLT are made for. I really hope
that people will use them correctly, and to their full potential.

I've seen XQueries of thousands of lines of code, doing VERY
complex real world transformations. The same transformation in
Java over DOM would have been a factor of 10 or 50 X lines of code,
and MUCH messier code. I am not even bringing up SAX or JRS 173 or ....

Please don't go there....

Best regards,
Dana

P.S. Now to play devil's advocate against my own arguments:
every time when I was pointing out to my ex-fellows BEA engineers
that the messy Java code that they were writing could have been
written SO much simpler in XQuery, I consistently received the same
answer: "YES, maybe that's true, but I KNOW Java, and I do NOT
know XQuery. And BTW, there are no good debuggers for XQuery."

So we have work to do....