Re: Usage of Asterisk in XPath expressions

Liam,

Inevitably your observation about axis specifiers raises a larger
question about fun namespace prefixes:

'element'
'attribute'
'node'
'select'

... are there others we should be especially careful about?

Cheers, Wendell

On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 4:12 PM Liam R. E. Quin liam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2019-03-22 at 13:33 +0000, Martin Honnen martin.honnen@xxxxxx
> wrote:
> >
> [...]
> > However, the other main reason that doesn't raise an error is that
> > ancestor-or-self::foo evaluates to the empty sequence in the context
> > of that document and that way the multiplication also evaluates to
> > the empty sequence.
>
> Yup, You're a star! :D
>
> As Mike Kay points out separately, itbs a problem when a language gets
> so terse that almost any string of puctuation has a meaning.
>
> With regular expressions i tend to write [(] and [)] because i can
> never remember in which sytaxes \(...\) is special, same with [{]
> braces [}]. There can be an efficiency overhead for doing this, but
> therebs a bigger efficiency overhead in time lost from a confused
> developer :)
>
> Similarly, avoid using XPath axis names as namespace prefixes :-) :-)
>
> Liam
>
>
> --
> Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
> Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
> XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
> Web slave for vintage clipart http://www.fromoldbooks.org/
>



--
Wendell Piez | wendellpiez.com | wendell -at- nist -dot- gov
pellucidliterature.org | github.com/wendellpiez |
gitlab.coko.foundation/wendell  - pausepress.org