Besides casting to xs:string, there's also good old fn:string(), which has some recursive benefit. -m

So what is it good at Norm? You've listed the odd bits. Does it have any real use, better than xslt 2 areas?

The problem is that the element name “<l:someothername/>” in an actual XML document can never be in no namespace.

Is it possible that, in this instance, it's XML that's broken, not XQuery?

Having a default namespace for the bulk of your markup but being able to insert a few no-namespace elements doesn't seem completely ridiculous to me though, of course, you might want to ask why the inserted elements aren't in a namespace. A possible use case would be an XSLT stylesheet which generates no-namespace documents where you could avoid all the xsl: prefixes.

My main difficulty with XQuery, which I think is reflected a bit in your posting, is that it's a few different syntaxes combined, and if I haven't coded in it in a few months I get confused about which bits are supposed to go where--for example, when to use XML comments and when to use the adorable smiley face comments. (Idiosyncratic as perl is, I don't have that problem there.) But remember, XQuery wasn't designed to appeal to XML people; it's the XML manipulation program for people who don't like XML, with its curly braces and semicolons (just like a real programming language!) and the "SQL-like" keywords.

I don't hate XQuery, like I hated, say, Omnimark syntax, but I find it a bit frustrating at times. The real power is in the implementations: the ability to retrieve subsets of gigabytes of indexed XML purely based on element and attribute conditions, with no need for the storage program to "chunk" the storage into something that it can map to its legacy document storage technology.

Interesting to hear about your encounters with XQuery syntax here and via Twitter. I've just added a few of your gotchas to

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XQuery/Gotchas

in the XQuery Wikibook which you may like to improve.

This XQuery resource is mainly examples of simple applications I'm interested in but I'm working on a new section focused on patterns of XQuery application design. The book is rather eXist focused because that's my environment but I'd like to be able to include some Mark Logic examples, perhaps as comparative implementations of the same problem.