Re: We need an XPath API

[Charles Reitzel <creitzel@mediaone.net>]

Question: I just read the XPath spec (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath.html) and
checked the errata.  Where does it say that CDATA sections are supressed.
The Infoset (current and previous versions) will include CDATA start/end
nodes as element children.  My reading of the XPath data model is that it
just uses the Infoset's notion of element children.

Thanks for any pointers,
Charles Reitzel

At 10:18 AM 3/6/01 +0100, Daniel Veillard wrote:
>On Mon, Mar 05, 2001 at 07:54:14PM -0500, Thomas B. Passin wrote:
>> Charles Reitzel writes, doing an admirable job of assimilating all these
>> contributions -
>> 
>> >
>> > Doesn't XPointer just use XPath?  In which case, the lib should be able to
>> > do these things.  I guess this starts getting into XSLT and
>> > XPointer-specific extensions to XPath.  This probably calls for a couple
>> > SAX-style extension identifier URNs.  So an app can say "I need XSLT 1.1
>> > XPath extensions" and the parser can say yes or no.
>> >
>> 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. 
>  As we say "ce qui se concoit bien s'exprime clairement" so if it is
>easy to picture it's not that hard to express (in whatever language). But
>sure it's not nodesets anymore, but the new types (ranges and points) as
>defined in XPointer.
>
>Daniel
>
>-- 
>Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network http://redhat.com/products/network/
>veillard@redhat.com  | libxml Gnome XML toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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>