XPointer string functions -- abandoned?

[Piotr Bański <bansp@o2.pl>]

Dear All,

This is inspired by the exchange I've just seen on the Gnome XML list,
forwarded below.

My question is: how 'exotic' (or plainly thoughtless) are we in relying
on the development of, and support for, XPointer technology for the
description of linguistic resources? I know of the permanent
temporariness of the xpointer() part of the XPointer framework, but I've
always been hoping that things would move on in this area, eventually.
And now Daniel Veillard's remark below has struck me as somewhat
ominous. I made a quick search for "xpointer" in the xml-dev archive on
my disk, and it hasn't yielded much, contrary to what I expected.

Should I slowly prepare myself to abandon all hope? It's such a useful
mechanism for addressing bits of text that you want to describe in a
remote/stand-off fashion (whereby, in a linguistic corpus, you keep the
raw text untouched, and merely address spans of it (tokens, phrases,
sentences, etc.) from another XML file; more details and URLs buried below).

Thanks!

  Piotr

-------- Original message --------
Subject: Re: [xml] patch to XPointer -- any plans?
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:14:23 +0200
From: Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>
To: Adam Przepiorkowski <adamp@ipipan.waw.pl>
CC: xml@gnome.org

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 11:55:10AM +0200, Adam Przepiorkowski wrote:
> 
> Are there any plans to apply the patch submitted as a comment to:
> 
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563562
> 
> to the main distribution?

  I had no time until now to work on libxml2 maintainance, I'm looking
at bugs with patches now

> Is there are any work on the issues listed in:
> 
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583442

  I'm not sure I will have time, XPointer seems a kind of abandonned
by the industry and W3C, so somehow I wonder if it's worth the effort,
I will have a quick look if it's something obvious.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
daniel@veillard.com  | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library  http://libvirt.org/
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