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RE: ANN: xpath1() scheme for XPointer


RE:  ANN: xpath1() scheme for XPointer
At 11:01 AM +0100 10/25/02, Michael Kay wrote:
>It might also aid interoperability to say
>something explicit about the handling of whitespace-only text nodes.

What would you need to say about this? XPath is unambiguous about 
handling this. Perhaps it just needs to be pointed out that 
whitespace only nodes do count, though I hope by now most XPath users 
know this.

>I'm a little surprised that you seem [from the last sentence of section
>3] to see the scheme as providing a way of addressing within an XML
>entity, rather than an XML document. In fact, I think it would be most
>useful to say that both entity expansion and XInclude processing should
>happen before XPath evaluation.

Entity expansion is a good idea. I don't think the XPath data model 
really applies unless entities have been expanded. XInclude 
resolution is trickier. The proper result of applying an XPath 
expression to a document containing XInclude is completely 
unambiguous, and it does not involve XInclude resolution.  Consider, 
for example, the XPath expression //xinclude:include.

Thinking about this, I suspect it's a URI level question. The 
document before XInclude resolution is not the same as the document 
after XInclude resolution. These are two different documents. They 
are two different resources. They need to have distinguishable URIs. 
Unfortunately right now they don't.

This could be hacked with an xinclude pointer part; e.g. 
xinclude(yes) or xinclude(no) but that's really the wrong layer. 
We're not using these to select a different part of the document. 
We're using them to select a different document. That's what the URL 
is for.

I'm not sure where you could put the xinclude processing in the URL? 
The scheme? The authority? The user info? Perhaps 
http://www.example.com/ points to the document as it exists and 
xinclude:http://www.example.com/ points to the document after 
XIncludes. But whatever the URL looks like, these are two different 
documents, and that needs to be recognized.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
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|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
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