Jonathan Robie announced Quilt, "an XML query language designed for queries on heterogeneous data sources, and drawing from the design of XQL, XML-QL, SQL, and OQL," on the XQL list.

Although the authors (Jonathan Robie, Don Chamberlin and Dana Florescu) are all members of the W3C XML Query WG and the language has been designed to meet the requirements of the WG, Robie says that:

"Since the Query WG is not yet working on concrete query languages, it is too early to say how it will respond to this proposal."

The purpose of the language seems therefore to be to illustrate the Query WG requirements document with a general purpose query language:

"Several XML-based query languages have been proposed, each oriented toward a specific category of information. Quilt is a new proposal that attempts to unify concepts from several of these query languages, resulting in a new language that exploits the full versatility of XML."

Quilt which has chosen a "human readable" syntax as opposed to a "XML based syntax":

"The W3C XML Query Working Group has identified a requirement for both a human-readable query syntax and an XML-based query syntax. Quilt is designed to meet the first of these requirements. We recognize that an alternative, XML-based syntax for the Quilt semantics would be useful for some applications."

It also includes features to query relational databases:

"for querying databases, the language needs to provide traditional database operations such as joins and grouping."