Re: We need an XPath API

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

Daniel Veillard wrote -

> On Mon, Mar 05, 2001 at 07:54:14PM -0500, Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> > XPointer starts with XPath and then adds extensions so you can specify
part of
> > a node (like part of a text block), or a range of nodes, or combinations.
> > Easy to picture, infernally hard to deal with when you are thinking in
terms
> > of nice clean node sets.
>
>   Well, taking that litterally hell doesn't sounds such a frightening place.
> Implementing XPointer on top of XPath in libxml took me 3-4 days. I have
> also heard of what was a positive experiment to add XPointer extensions
> in XT.

 I bow to your abilities, Daniel.  I didn't mean, though, that implementing
XPointer should be especially hard, but only that if you were picturing an API
which returned nodes or sets of nodes that came from straight from the source,
that XPointer would blur that "clean" picture, since it can cross node
boundaries.

Cheers,

Tom P