Learn XQUERY and EveryThing Xquery

What#39;s the difference between CSS, XPath, XSLT and XQuery?

In this session in the Advanced Digital Editing series, we define and unpack four languages or technologies often used to ...

Here's a breakdown of the differences between CSS, XPath, XSLT, and XQuery:

Example:

css

h1 {
  color: blue;
  font-size: 24px;
}

Purpose: A language for navigating through elements and attributes in an XML document.
Use Case: Used to select nodes from an XML document.
Syntax: Uses path expressions to navigate through the XML structure.
Example:
xpath
```
/library/book/title
```
This selects the title elements of all books in the library.

Purpose: A language for transforming XML documents into other formats (like HTML, plain text, or other XML).
Use Case: Often used in conjunction with XPath to apply transformations using stylesheets.
Syntax: Uses templates and rules to define how to transform the XML.

Example:

xml

<xsl:template match="/library">
  <html>
    <body>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="book"/>
    </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>

Purpose: A functional query language designed to query and manipulate XML data.
Use Case: Can retrieve, transform, and aggregate data from XML documents.
Syntax: Combines elements of functional programming with SQL-like query capabilities.

Example:

xquery

for $book in doc("books.xml")/library/book
return <title>{ $book/title/text() }</title>

CSS is for styling HTML, XPath is for navigating XML data, XSLT is for transforming XML documents, and XQuery is for querying and manipulating XML data.
CSS and XSLT are primarily concerned with presentation, while XPath and XQuery focus on data retrieval and manipulation.