Solutions are possible for most of these things and I'm not sure I agree with Tom that this should be abandoned for XQuery. I see them as being complementary if implemented correctly. For instance you could use linking as a mechanism to optimize XQuery evaluation by prewiring some of the relationships. Likewise XQuery can be used to express relationships that are not known via linking. I like the flexibility of having both, if the linking issues can be resolved acceptably.
You could always express the same hardwired linking format in your documents and use a stock XQuery script to expand them instead of having a custom DOM implementation do it behind your back. What I ultimately really want is to have our DOM implementation function identically to any other DOM you could bootstrap using JAXP, and offload functionality like AutoLink into another layer, preferably into an XQuery engine, where the behavior is easily coded, instead of using Java to do it. Personally, I don't like XQuery, and would prefer it we XUpdate and XSelect were the standards, but I'm not the one who influences the XML world :-)
-- Tom Bradford - http://www.tbradford.org Developer - Apache Xindice (Native XML Database) Creator - Project Labrador (XML Object Broker)
