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Re: Quick Xpath

• To: bob@w...
• Subject: Re: Quick Xpath
• From: David Carlisle <davidc@n...>
• Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 16:15:28 +0100
• Cc: jeni@j..., michael.h.kay@n..., xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <Pine.LNX.3.96.1020718105304.31215C-100000@e...>(message from bob mcwhirter on Thu, 18 Jul 2002 10:55:16 -0400 (EDT))
• References: <Pine.LNX.3.96.1020718105304.31215C-100000@e...>

> Seems like most folks are happy with 1.0 (or at least
> are not too unhappy with it).  2.0 just seems to lose much of
> the simplicity and -value- that XPath 1.0 has for many developers.

Xpath2 as currently drafted in the working draft is basically unusable.

However I'm still hoping that Xpath2 as it finally emerges will be a
usable extension of Xpath2 with regexp and date support and one or two
extra useful operations like "is" (node equality) and unicode and
collation aware string ordering.

The simplest solution is just to move the more horrible bits ito the
xquery-only part of the documents. That would leave Xquery as being in
the same (unpleasant) state, but I'm less worried about that. Xquery is
designed as a top level language so at least it does not affect anything
else, but Xpath is a general purpose language designed to be embedded in
other things, and a bloated XPath2 would in the end affect not only XSLT
(the first casualty) but Xpointer, DOM, ... They may not immediately
pick up on Xpath2 but there would be continual pressure to update any
API based on Xpath 1.


David

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• References:
  • Re: Quick Xpath
    • From: bob mcwhirter <bob@w...>

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