1.4. XPath and XPointer Versus XQuery

To get one other important question out of the way immediately: XPath and XPointer are not XQuery. The latter is a recent addition to the (rather crowded) gallery of the W3C's XML-related standards. Its purpose is to provide to XML-based data stores some (ideally all) of the advantages of Structured Query Language (SQL) in the relational-database world. In SQL, a very simple query might look something like this:

SELECT emp_id, emp_name
FROM emp_table
WHERE emp_id = "73519"