xml-dev - a nice demo page for XPath

[Jean-Marc Vanel <jmvanel@free.fr>]

Look at http://wwbota.free.fr/Samples/DisplayDescriptions/speciesGUI.htm

This HTML + DHML + Javascript + XML + XPath page allows to :
- visualize any XML document on the Web
- visualize structure of the XML document as a list of XPath paths
- experiment with XPath requests

I used it recently for trainings on XPath. The underlying Javascript
code is also interesting for its own sake; it is under GNU GPL licence.
For this version, the code has been tidied and enhanced.

More explanations about this page are at :
http://wwbota.free.fr/Samples/DisplayDescriptions/explanations.htm

It currently works with Internet Explorer 5, plus the DLL patch
msxml3.dll conforming to XPath et XSLT recommandations, downloadable
from
http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml

It should be possible to adapt this page for other browsers, either with

the Xalan applet, or with Mozilla's  new  XSLT functionalities.

Also some Javascript + DHTML code could be added to have a GUI to help
generate XPath queries without having to copy-and-paste XPath strings
from the page.
For instance a general query in construction such as

/a[constraint1]/b[constraint2]    |    <same thing>

could be associated to pull-down menus:
- / or // or .
- b or other possible tags at same depth level
- for adding constraints a button will insert a GUI of the same kind as
the entry general query GUI, since a constraint's syntax  is the same as

a general XPath string.

Also desirable would be the generation of a skeleton DOM document to
record the structure of the instance document, instead of the simple
associative array with XPath strings that is currently used.

This page has been developped as part of the "Worlwide Botanical
Knowledge Base" project, see :
http://wwbota.free.fr/


--
<person>
  <firstName>Jean-Marc</firstName>
  <lastName>Vanel</LastName>
  <motto>Veni, vidi, convici</motto>
  <conference>9th International World Wide Web Conference - Amsterdam,
May 15-19, 2000
   <a href="http://www.www9.org/">site</a>
  </conference>
  <project>Worlwide Botanical Knowledge Base -
      making botany available on Internet
    <a href="http://wwbota.free.fr/" >site</a>
  </project>
  <a href="http://jmvanel.free.fr/>home page</a>
  <a href="mailto:jmvanel@free.fr">mail (possibly put "wwbota" in
subject to route your mail in relevant folder)</a>
</person>