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RE: ANN: xpath1() scheme for XPointer

• To: "'Simon St.Laurent'" <simonstl@s...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: ANN: xpath1() scheme for XPointer
• From: "Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@n...>
• Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 11:01:24 +0100
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <r01050400-1021-9AEC0236E5D011D688F20003937A08C2@[192.168.124.21]>
• Reply-to: <michael.h.kay@n...>

> I've just published an IETF Internet-Draft that defines an 
> xpath1() scheme for use inside the XPointer Framework.
> 
> The I-D is available at: 
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-stlaurent-xpath-frag-00.txt
> 
> For those who aren't fond of huge amounts of whitespace, an 
> HTML version is available at: 
> http://simonstl.com/ietf/draft-stlaurent-xpath-frag-00.html
> 

Good stuff.

I would tighten it up by saying explicitly that variable references, and
function calls other than the core functions defined in XPath 1.0, are
not allowed, and that the XPath expression is evaluated with a context
position and size of 1, and a context node that is the element
containing the XPointer. It might also aid interoperability to say
something explicit about the handling of whitespace-only text nodes.

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.

I've been looking for a way of defining a syntax for XPath expressions
that doesn't depend on the namespace context, for use in a dynamic
xx:evaluate(), and this XPointer scheme seems to provide the answer.

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@n...
work: Michael.Kay@s... 

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: ANN: xpath1() scheme for XPointer
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • RE: ANN: xpath1() scheme for XPointer
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
  • Re: ANN: xpath1() scheme for XPointer
    • From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>

• References:
  • ANN: xpath1() scheme for XPointer
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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