Re: Use case

I guess what I was trying to say is, let's list any clear use cases,
both to give the idea of having xPath *officially* in DOM as much
support as possible, and also so we can see if any of the use cases make
any difference to any of the possible design decisions which would have
to be taken by an official W3C rec.

Dave Pawson wrote:
> 
> My prime one is the 'across invocation' bookmark.
> 
[==reordered para==]
> My basic need is to translate user navigation input
> 'up' 'down' 'left' 'right'
> with units being leaf, level n levels etc., into
> xpath commands which are relative to any given location.
> 
> Admitted the documents I will be dealing with are unlikely
> to change (being on CD ;-) but the idea of a node identifier
> which I could guarantee would be valid between invocation would
> be a step forward.
> 
So am I right in saying that what you want to do is track your user's
navigation of some kind of tree-structured XML display, both to navigate
it as easily as possible at run-time, and also because you can build an
xPath expression that can be kept as a bookmark for later re-use. And
that without xPath you would have to do more work to track your user's
tree-navigation, and you would also have to design, implement and debug
a way of storing that string of DOM navigation steps in such a way that
it could be re-played later?

Sounds to me like a pretty compelling argument that not having xPath
available would require you to re-invent most of the xPath wheel. 

> 
> Have you not seent the one that's been posted to xml-dev?
> http://www.246.ne.jp/~kamiya/pub/omquery.zip
> 
I hadn't loaded it up - there is also (or was - no response right now)
XPathDOM from http://www.falconwing.com/~schen/, and, as Julian Reschke
points out, the selectNodes() method in MSXML. Oracle also appears to
have gone with selectNodes().

Which I think at least establish that XPath is going to get implemented
in or on DOM, in standard or non-standard ways. 

Francis.

Received on Tuesday, 2 May 2000 13:05:18 UTC