Michael, this is GREAT work you've done! I particularly like the idea of shaping an expression back to it's original lexical space to make XML Schema bijective. That raises the idea to 200 %! But I tend to believe that XPATH translate() won't provide sufficient functionality. How could it, for example, translate the following date values into valid xs:date values (and back):   MM.dd.yyyy   (US American)   dd.MM.yyyy   (German) I suspect Regular Expression to be a more flexible way to translate arbitrary lexical spaces by identifying and retaining informational particles of strings. Examples:             Your thoughts?