Re: The DOM XPath interface -- what is its status?

On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 21:36 +0200, Robin Berjon wrote:
> We discussed it briefly in November and indeed we may have some. In 
> particular, our users tend to think that it's overly complicated, which 
> we have attributed (perhaps wrongly) to trying to be forward-compatible 
> with XPath 2.0.

I don't believe the current complexity should be attributed to XPath 2.0
(which is a fine and compelling technology for XSLT 2.0 btw but this is
not the place for XPath 2.0 advertisement :).
The only complexity added by XPath 2.0 is the result of the
XPathEvaluator.evaluate method. It is a DOMObject instead of a
XPathResult object.
The other added complexities were:
- the type and result parameters on the XPathEvaluator.evaluate method;
- the iterator vs snapshots in the XPathResult interface;
- the XPathExpression object;
- the support for XPath namespace nodes.
The first three were done due to performance consideration. The last one
was done for full XPath 1.0 support.
Besides those, I don't think that the proposal could be simplified.

>  Noise was made according to which it would be simpler to 
> drop XP2 support entirely now and revisit it later, and add (optional) 
> CSS support instead.

I doubt you would simplify the current proposal by dropping XP2 and
adding CSS, unless you reuse the XPathResult for CSS results as well.

Philippe