Re: [xml-dev] Concerned about the increasing reliance on XPath

[Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>]

Just realised the folly of asking for another shorthand though,
since, as Andrew pointed out, we have the shorthand *: there
already in XPath 2.0,
so I can just write

/*:foo/...

as shorthand for

/*local-name()='foo'/...

Pity I can't do this in XPath 1.0 though.

----
Stephen D Green



On 9 May 2011 18:21, Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com> wrote:
> What would help would be another shorthand for "/*local-name()='foo'/...",
> say something like "/{foo}/..." or some other parenthesis-based shorthand.
>
> I remember how when pocket calculators came out there was the issue
> of operator precedence. It was solved when they added brakets to the
> key pad so you could make the precedence explicit (the implicit precedence
> differed between calculators so the same calculation key-press sequence
> was giving different results in different calculators). It's a bit
> like that here.
> Expecting people to know the default operator precedence for their
> calculator before pressing keys would be unrealistic - and there the problem
> was less severe than here, I think, because it was only more complex
> calculation sequences where the problem was apparent; here it is simple
> ones too.
>
> ----
> Stephen D Green
>
>
>
> On 9 May 2011 17:10, Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:
>> On 09/05/2011 16:43, Stephen D Green wrote:
>>>
>>> I tried to think of a way to write the XPath expression so
>>> it gives the same result whatever the version of XPath
>>
>> You can write
>>
>> /example:a/@version-id = 0.4
>>
>> or
>>
>> /example:a/@version-id = '0.4'
>>
>> depending on which you mean [*], in both cases using the API of the
>> processor to ensure that prefix "example" is bound to namespace URI
>> "http://www.example.com";.
>>
>> Writing it in a way that doesn't depend on any namespace bindings set up via
>> the API is much harder - XPath is designed on the assumption that the
>> bindings will be set up externally, and you're going against the grain if
>> you don't want to do that.
>>
>> Michael Kay
>> Saxonica
>>
>> [*] the first will also match version-id="0.40", the second won't. Yes,
>> XPath is not a language designed for people who find such fine distinctions
>> irritating - the "do what I meant, not what I said" brigade.
>>
>>
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>