[lholst@students.cs.uu.nl: following/preceding-sibling shorthands in XPath 2.0]

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Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/

attached mail follows:

What about creating shorthands for following-sibling and 
preceding-sibling in XPath 2.0?

following-sibling::chapter[fn:position() = 1] could be
+chapter[1]

and

preceding-sibling::chapter[fn:position() = 1] could be
-chapter[1]

Neither + or - are legal characters to start an XML element name with, 
so I think this syntax is possible. Other usage examples would be +[1] 
and -[1] for +*[1] and -*[1].

In my company's product we have changed from our own targeting method to 
XPath (shorthand notation), and this is one thing we're missing. We use 
these selectors so often that we currently defined our own syntax for it 
('~+chapter[1]' and '~-chapter[1]'), but we would prefer to use a 
standardized method.


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san nan da!!