Well, idioyncracies of XPath such as namespaces and filter predicates left aside, the idea of XPath starts from encoding documents into graphs of axis relations and then answering variable-free conjunctive path queries over those graphs, and as such is at least as old as terminological reasoning and description logic (no later than 1990), but arguably only slightly younger than Prolog/Datalog (1972) and at least as old as eg. monadic second-order logic (1975 or older).
As applied to document engineering, I haven't been around long enough to have an opinion, but I can say that HyTime (1992, 1997) encoded path steps in location ladders (in markup/markup declarations) rather than compact expressions, probably to avoid ad-hoc syntax. Modern TEI uses XPointer (and hence also XPath), but TEI predates XML and I have no idea how TEI was like in the 1990s.
Marcus Reichardt sgmljs.net Am 17.11.2019 um 02:17 schrieb Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@yahoo.de>:
Thank you, Marcus, Henry, Michael! But the idea of XPath appears to me so coherent that I find it difficult to believe that it emerged in a process which has to do with votings and can be captured by minutes. I would really like to get closer to the core of it.
Hans-Jürgen
John Steinbeck, East of Eden: "Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man."
Am Sonntag, 17. November 2019, 01:18:30 MEZ hat Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> Folgendes geschrieben:
Others with better memories can probably give more details, and there
should be minutes somewhere once someone can come up with
precise dates...
I based the historical information in my book on minutes of meetings, and Sharon always used to tell me I got it all wrong. Presumably because the minutes were not (in her perception) an accurate account of what really happened in the corridors.
I'm reminded of a nice remark in Martin Campbell-Kelly's excellent corporate history of ICL, that much of the information came from board minutes, and therefore at best, it didn't reflect what was actually going on in the company, but rather, what the board of directors thought was going on.
Michael Kay Saxonica
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