Re: XPath & CSS, again

Pascal Schmitt wrote:
> What about using XPath with CSS?

It could be done. The argument I've heard the most is that since XPath 
is more complete and more general it would have performance issues 
compared to Selectors which were pretty much designed just for CSS 
(which is why they are almost never reused outside). I haven't seen 
numbers to back that up, but I would tend to believe it could be true.

I do very much like the intent of bringing XPath and Selectors together 
though. W3C made a very serious mistake for which we are still paying 
the price when it allowed for both to be developed separately, and 
anything done to bring them back together can only help. I'm not 
convinced that merging the syntaxes in the way you propose is the way to 
go. I have been thinking along the lines of defining a CSS-compatible 
subset of XPath (since Selectors are largely a subset, with very little 
that's not in XPath or couldn't be expressed in it) so that one could 
use either in the same context with implementations only having to deal 
with different syntaxes.

I'm not sure what the steps beyond that would be, but any step towards 
better integration would be helpful.

-- 
Robin Berjon
   Research Scientist
   Expway, http://expway.com/

Received on Friday, 8 April 2005 10:32:55 UTC