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> I still hate the syntax, and it sets my teeth on edge every time I come near it.
I'm no great fan myself, but it's not the superficial things that bug me, like using angle brackets rather than curly braces, it's the fact that it's a two-language system (XSLT/XPath) without composability between the two; and if you fix that, then it's not just a different syntax, it's a very different language.
The use of XML does bring some considerable advantages, most notably the fact that there's never any problem extending the grammar with new features. By contrast XQuery tends to suffer the regex problem that every sequence of characters already means something.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
