XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference, 4th Edition (377 page)

It is now possible to select nodes with a given local-name, regardless of their namespace. This is done using the syntax
*:local-name
, which mirrors the syntax
prefix:*
that is used to select all nodes in a given namespace, regardless of their local-name.

The operators
except
and
intersect
are new in XPath 2.0, and the keyword
union
has been introduced as a synonym for
|
. The alternative spelling
union
has been added because it is familiar from SQL, and because the operator
|
can get rather lost visually when it is used to combine the results of two complex
for
expressions. This applies especially to XQuery, where the operator may often be used to combine the results of two FLWOR expressions that might each be a dozen lines long (FLWOR expressions are XQuery's equivalent to the SELECT statement of SQL).