It was about a templating engine for HTML which used xpath to fill in certain parts of already existing HTML templates.
The cool thing about it was that the HTML was already "presentable" before the filling in took place.
With XSLT you put the XPath on the outside and update the elements choosen by the XPath. With XQuery you put the XPath in the HTML (actually XML) and it inserts something.
I build my webpage with my own XQuery processor: https://github.com/benibela/site/blob/master/style.xq.html
The HTML code looks very presentable at first. Although it is not, since the browser dies at
> It was about a templating engine for HTML which used xpath to fill in certain parts of already existing HTML templates.
> The cool thing about it was that the HTML was already "presentable" before the filling in took place.
Not xpath based, but Template Attribute Language in its various implementations has that quality, plus the advantage that templates are valid HTML/XML even before rendering:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_Attribute_Language
This means that not only are templates "presentable" prior to rendering, they are round-tripable between developers' and designers' tools, facilitating collaboration.