This is work in progress and does not imply endorsement by the W3C membership . XML Activity , following the procedures set out for the W3C Process . The XML Query Working Group feels that the contents of this Working Draft are pretty much stable, and therefore encourages to provide feedback as early as possible. The goal of the XML Query Working Group is to produce a data model for XML documents, a set of query operators on that data model, and a query language based on these query operators. The data model will be based on the W3C XML Information Set , and will include support for Namespaces .
Queries operate on single documents or fixed collections of documents.
They can select whole documents or subtrees of documents that match conditions defined on document content and structure, and can construct new documents based on what is selected. The following usage scenarios describe how XML queries may be used in various environments, and represent a wide range of activities and needs that are representative of the problem space to be addressed. They are intended to be used as design cases during the development of XML Query, and should be reviewed when critical decisions are made. These usage scenarios should also prove useful in helping non-members of the XML Query Working Group understand the intent and goals of the project. 2.1 Human-readable documents Perform queries on structured documents and collections of documents, such as technical manuals, to retrieve individual documents, to generate tables of contents, to search for information in structures found within a document, or to generate new documents as the result of a query.