Re: We need an XPath API

[Christian Nentwich <c.nentwich@cs.ucl.ac.uk>]

>For instance, in DOM you can have consecutive text nodes. This usually
>happens as a result of XML parsers returning text in several chunks. XPath
>has no notion of that, if it selects the text() inside an element, I guess
>that what is expected is that it returns a single text node.

That's certainly not what I expect. In fact, I expect XPath to get me stuff
from my DOM tree without modifying it. If text nodes are to be merged, the
parser can be instructed to do that. Also, text() and node() would exhibit
different behaviour.. you certainly don't want nodes to be merged ?

In any case, a merge function would be nice.. merge(text()) and all your
problems are dealt with :)

> The other option is to return as many text nodes as there are in the DOM,
> but that could break various expectations (stuff relying on position for
> instance).

In my experience, "stuff relying on positions" equates to a bad stylesheet /
xpath expressions the same way that specifying a row would in SQL: it
removes a level of independence - there is almost always a way around it.

Christian Nentwich