Question

I was researching alternatives to using Microsoft’s XslCompiledTransform and everything seemed to point towards Saxon primarily and secondly XQSharp. As I started to look at documentation for Saxon I saw that XQuery could do the equivalent of my XSLTs that are no where near as terse as XQuery’s markup is.

What advantages do XSLTs offer over XQuery to deserve the much more detailed syntax?

Would it be the templating functionality that can be created?

Answer 1

XSLT is designed to take one xml document and transform it into something else, e.g. csv, html or a different xml format, e.g. xhtml.

XQuery is designed to extract information from one or more xml documents, and combine the result into a new xml document.

Both XQuery and XSLT rely heavily on XPath. If your output is based on one input xml document and **one output xml document, the two can pretty much be interchanged.

The FLWR syntax of XQuery is quite intuitive, if you have an SQL back-ground, IMO XSLT is the more powerful language when dealing with one input/one output situations, especially if the output will not be xml.

Personally I find the xml based syntax and the declarative nature of XSLT slightly difficult to read and maintain.

It really boils down to choice, although using XQuery for “simple” formatting is slightly unusual. If your input is based on more than one xml document, you are pretty much stuck with XQuery, if your output is not xml based, you are pretty much stuck with XSLT.