I must admit I’m not fully up on what’s happening here (if someone could give me a brief digest I’d be eternally grateful). However, my 2c:
An XML database is the logical backend for a weblog publishing or aggregation system.
Whatever the back end, XQuery is the logical front end for rendering weblog style content metadata – as XHTML, ATOM, RSS whatever – it can do so on the fly.
If you have a weblog application layer written in XQuery it is human readable and extensible. Plus you can have an entire weblog style content management system written in XQuery.
If you have XQuery you don’t need SOAP or XML-RPC – or Atom for that matter, unless… the Atom API can be expressed in XQuery directly.
So my question is, can Atom, API’s and content be expressed entirely in XQuery as it stands?(Inserts are not covered by XQuery – but there are XQuery-like syntaxes for this).
If not I think it would prove to be a major benefit if that were the case.