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Re: Question for the XPath and DOM folks

• To: "Garland foster" <garland_foster@s...>
• Subject: Re: Question for the XPath and DOM folks
• From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
• Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 14:28:44 -0600
• Cc: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: Message from "Garland foster" <garland_foster@s...> of "Sat, 20 Jul 2002 17:02:11 -0300." <02dc01c23028$56083a00$c000a8c0@salutia>
• Sender: uche.ogbuji@f...

> I think that the answer to your question is: It should return the first
> non-empty TEXT DOM node ("bar") (!!!)
> I'm based on this from DOM3-Xpath
> 
> Quote
> 
> "The XPath model relies on the XML Information Set [XML Information set]
> ands represents Character Information Items in a single logical text node
> where DOM may have multiple fragmented Text nodes due to cdata sections,
> entity references, etc. Instead of returning multiple nodes where XPath sees
> a single logical text node, only the first non-empty DOM Text or
> CDATASection node of any logical XPath text will be returned in the node
> set. Applications using XPath in an environment with fragmented text nodes
> must manually gather the text of a single logical text node possibly from
> multiple nodes beginning with the first Text node or CDATASection node
> returned by the implementation."

Yikes!   This is a *very* *very* bad job.  Luckily that spec is still a WD and 
I hope they'll fix it before release.  If they can't do better than that then 
they should just leave DOM/XPath interaction to application specifics.

I, for one, would be inclined to just ignore the spec as it is with regard to 
our DOM/XPath integration.


> So if applied to a DOM tree fo the Document Xpath returns something
> different that applying the same query to an XML document directly
> this is really obscure and confusing.

Yes it is.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net    http://4Suite.org    http://fourthought.com
Track chair, XML/Web Services One Boston: http://www.xmlconference.com/
The many heads of XML modeling - http://adtmag.com/article.asp?id=6393
Will XML live up to its promise? - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/li
brary/x-think11.html

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