Expression context

Dear Sir,

The term "expression context" is used in several chapters in the XPath
recommendation. However, the recommendation defines neither the term nor the
way to specify it for the XML processor.

This creates a problem with QNames, which must be expanded using namespace
URI. However, if there is no way to define an expression context, there is
no way to declare the namespaces. The result is that QNames can not be used
if an XPath expression is used for navigation in an XML document.

It seems to be no problem to use XPath in XSL-T stylesheets, since a
stylesheet does contain the declarations of namespaces used in XPath
expressions. However, there is no mechanism (or requirements for an XML
processor) provided to use QNames if an XPath expression is used directly
for navigation in the parsed XML document (when there is no XML document,
which uses the XPath expression).

Is this behavior as designed?

Regards,
Gennady Loskutov

Received on Tuesday, 29 August 2000 10:23:35 UTC