Michael Kay wrote:
> You can argue that the equivalent syntax in XSLT is very cumbersome, but
> that only becomes a problem if you're doing heavy joins, and I very rarely
> see applications that need that: in XML 90% of the relationships tend to be
> within the hierarchy, so you use the XPath axes rather than value-based
> joins.
Some common reasons I have seen for doing lots of joins: references
among web pages (especially in mailing list archives!), ATOM or RSS
feeds, joins among XML views of relational tables, correlation data from
several hierarchies to create a different representation...
If every set of data had only one sensible hierarchical relationship, we
wouldn't wind up doing so much joins and restructuring.
Jonathan
