Comment by tracnar

Nice! I tried using XQuery (superset of XPath 3) for a while through the BaseX implementation. It's pretty nice, but you have to face XML problems like namespaces, document order, attributes vs nodes, you don't know if you can have 0, 1 or more nodes, etc. Something I wish was more readily available would be to run XPath against JSON, yaml, etc. It's a nicer language than say jq, but its ties to XML sometimes make it hard to transfer.

Another pain point with XML is the lack of inline schema, so the languages around like XPath have to work with arbitrary structures unlike say JSON where you at least have basic primitives like map/dict, numbers, bool, etc