Hi Marc,
Why do you hesitate about adding API access to such data? Is that a technical/complexity or more a design concern?
One of the reasons is that we have quite a lot of different APIs, and it takes quite some time to provide new features in more than one API (which is often a user request if a feature turns out to be successful). This is why we tend to include new features either via BaseX commands or directly in XQuery, or in both.
Maybe we could provide additional commands and add XQuery functionality in a second step.
Some more questions:
[...] where one, system (not an XQuery app) needs to manipulate information on nodes as well as nodes themselves that can then be used in an XQuery app.
* Do you refer to document nodes, or nodes in general? In the latter case, we could also think about binding properties to node ids.
* Would it be sufficient to use strings for keys and values?
Christian