[Bug 7059] Forking XPath

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7059





--- Comment #6 from Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@redhat.com>  2009-06-26 22:52:29 ---
(In reply to comment #5)
> Here's how I understand the situation:
> 
> * HTML5 changes HTML's processing rules such that it would break any XPath that
> is currently being applied to text/html documents.
> * To keep XPath 1.0 expressions working, therefore, XPath 1.0 implementations
> that implement HTML5 would need to implement some changes.
> * They in fact already do. For example, WebKit does what HTML5 now describes.
> 
> Personally, I would rather not have to mention XPath in the HTML5 spec; the
> only reason it does mention it is to keep XPath 1.0 working.
> 
> If the XPath working group would rather this text be removed, then I would be
> happy to remove it. Is that the case?


I'm speaking personally so far, the XQuery and XSLT Working Groups may or may
not decide to endorse any comments I make here.

If you want a language that has different semantics from XPath, I think the
clean thing to do would be to create a completely different syntax. As long as
the language is almost the same as XPath, but semantically different, I think
it is likely to be called XPath by users and to cause confusion. Some of these
same users will also be processing XML and HTML using real XPath as part of
XQuery or XSLT, but not in a web browser environment.

As far as I understand, the changes that are needed are already supported in
XPath 2.0 if you use default element namespaces and define a mapping to the
XDM, and specify that you use compatibility mode. One workable approach is to
say that you support the subset of XPath 2.0 that corresponds to the XPath 1.0
grammar.

I suspect that one or more people from our Working Group would be happy to
discuss alternatives, perhaps in a telcon or an IRC meeting.


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Received on Friday, 26 June 2009 22:52:41 UTC