Re: ITS 2.0, Selectors 4 and Selectors API 2

On Mon, 2013-07-01 at 19:46 -0700, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
[...]
> If you want Selectors to be able to select attribute nodes, address it
> directly with a new selector.  This should not be smuggled in via the
> subject indicator.

Maybe it would be simpler to support an XPath() selector?

When you start using ITS you'll find other cases that get difficult with
existing CSS selectors, e.g.
  . partShortDescription elements whose id attribute value appears in
the list of id attributes in the "includes" attribute of a partsDiagram
element in the same section, and where that diagram has a
language="only" attribute on the "replacementCopies" element, and the
diagram issue year is earlier than 1996.

This sort of thing is fairly frequently written with XPath selectors
today, and is a plausible use case (e.g. the older exploded parts
diagram is only available in spanish, includes Spanish labels for the
parts that readers will have to match up to a table of part numbers, so
they need the same text in the diagram and in the table).

A rigorous comparison of XPath with CSS selectors would be worth doing;
piecemeal attempts to duplicate functionality don't seem worthwhile to
me. On the other hand I do agree that it sounds like some limitation in
CSS selector namespace handling could be alleviated.

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

Received on Tuesday, 2 July 2013 03:26:40 UTC