I'm not sure I quite understand yours, pg. It's the kind of abstract stuff that makes my head hurt.

Does anyone have a mental mapping that they use with Perl/SQL code, (he said, widening the discussion a little)?

Do you for instance think of

<xsl:apply-templates select="item">
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SELECT * FROM xml_document WHERE element_name = 'item'
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<xsl:template match="item">
<p>
    <xsl:value-of select="." />
</p>
</xsl:template>
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while(fetchrow-hashref){
  print '<p>' . $value . '<p>';
}
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Interesting... you know what, I actually had the same thought to compare XML with database and XSLT with SQL...

Actually there was (is) a XML query language defined, although I don't think it gained any serious attention.

More than SQL, which is just a set of command to manipulate the data in storage, XSLT is actully more similar to PL/SQL in terms of role.

To be quite frank, comparing with database, i am not in favor of XML at all, and have the feeling that XML will go away after a while (of course everything goes away eventually, but XML is not a very big success, in terms of technology).

Although XML is something new, but I can see lots of stuffs in it simply goes backwards.

Performance and bandwidth are two biggest problems with XML, and I strongly believe they are XML built-in. (Well one can always call something XML, even after it being foundamentaly modified *enhanced*, but to me that does not count)

What's your thought?