Balisage Paper: I say XSLT, you say XQuery: let's call the whole thing off
David J. Birnbaum
University of Pittsburgh
David J. Birnbaum is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been involved in the study of electronic text technology since the mid-1980s, has delivered presentations at a variety of electronic text technology conferences, and has served on the board of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the editorial board of Markup Languages: Theory and Practice, and the Text Encoding Initiative Council. Much of his electronic text work intersects with his research in medieval Slavic manuscript studies, but he also often writes about issues in the philosophy of markup.
Copyright © 2010 by the author. Used with permission.
Abstract
XSLT and XQuery can both be used for extracting information from XML resources and transforming it for presentation in a different form. The same task can be performed entirely with XSLT, entirely with XQuery, or using a combination of the two, and there seems to be no general consensus or guidelines concerning best practice for choosing among the available approaches. The author solved a specific problem initially (and satisfactorily) with XSLT because XQuery was not a sufficiently mature technology at the time the task first arose, but years later began to suspect that XQuery might be, in some ineffable way, a better fit than XSLT for the data and the task. Both the exclusively XSLT approach and the exclusively XQuery approach were comparable in functionality, efficiency, ease of development, and ease of maintenance, and they also shared (of course) an XPath addressing component, but they were nonetheless profoundly different in the way they interacted with the same source XML files. The goal of this presentation is to consider why one or the other technology may be a better fit for a particular combination of data and task, and to suggest guidelines for making decisions of that sort.