Re: [xsl] Re: XPath as a stand-alone programming language

[Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx>]

> We don't often hear from people using XPath but not (XSLT|XQuery), even
> though it is obviously a frequent thing to do.
>
> Liam

Actually, the existence of XPath processors can greatly benefit  the
development of both XSLT and XQuery processors.

It is easy to imagine XPath processors implementing a standard
interface so that any of them can be simply plugged in into any XSLT
or XQuery processor that is being developed -- not unlike the way an
XML parser is plugged in and in many cases substitutable by another
XML parser.


For example:

"If you don't supply a parser, Saxon will select one using the JAXP
mechanisms, specifically, the system property
javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory"

from the Saxon documentation:
http://saxon.sourceforge.net/saxon7.0/api-guide.html

Having such ready XPath components is going to make the development of
an XSLT/XQuery processor much faster and easier.

Cheers,

Dimitre.

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 11:55 AM, Liam R E Quin <liam@xxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-10-24 at 08:31 -0700, Dimitre Novatchev wrote:
>
>> As Liam noted, another good to have feature in XPath would be
>> namespace definition support and probably ways for defining the
>> initial context.
>
> I tried to get the XQuery and XSLT WGs interested in the idea of some
> sort of 'bind expression', e.g.
>   use prefix h = "some uri", i = "some uri" in h:/hello/i:invisible
> but they went instead down the road of EQNames, which are easier for
> machine generation of paths but harder for humans writing paths.
>
> We don't often hear from people using XPath but not (XSLT|XQuery), even
> though it is obviously a frequent thing to do.
>
> Liam
>
> --
> Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
> Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
> Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
> Co-author, 5th edition of "Beginning XML", Wrox, Summer 2012
>



-- 
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
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