XPath draft comments

[Scott Ferguson <ferg@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Kudos to the working group.  The XPath draft nicely separates the path language
from XSL, and the axis syntax is much clearer than the old syntax.  The spec gets
better and better.  I just have two minor comments.

For section 2, the node ordering issue,  I'd like to see all node-lists be in
document order.  The spec already raises the point that preceding::foo[1] and
(preceding::foo)[1] are inconsistent and potentially confusing.  From an
implementation point of view, it would be nice if they were the same.  My
implementation can take some shortcuts for path[1], but it can't for expr[1].  So
I'd like to be able to remove parentheses and treat (preceding::foo)[1] the same as
preceding::foo[1].

Implementing the namespace axis is tricky because DOM level 2 doesn't really
support namespace nodes.  Is the namespace axis really all that important?  Can
support be put off until XPath 1.1 and wait for DOM level 2 to figure out how it
wants to support namespaces?

In case anyone's curious, my XSL implementation is at http://www.caucho.com.  It
currently supports the April draft.  The XSL support is embedded in the JSP
engine.  So a foo.xtp page gets transformed by an XSL stylesheet into a JSP page.
There is a standalone XSL implementation, but it's not yet well documented.

(I'm holding off from making a real announcement until I've finished implementing
the July draft.  July XPath is done.  I'm starting on XSLT.)

Scott Ferguson
Caucho Technology



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