Re: [basex-talk] <rest:response> - unclear strategy of setting header during serialization

If you change the return type of an XQuery function to xs:string, your nodes will be implicitly converted to strings.

This is the standard behavior of XQuery and no particular feature of RESTXQ. Play around with the query that I presented in my previous answer. You need to remove the xs:string* return typeb you can replace it with item()*.