Re: essential test cases?

keshlam@us.ibm.com wrote:

> In other words, as XPath is currently written you _can't_
> see the literal as-written value of the namespace declaration.
>
> This may be suboptimial. But it's what was approved.
>
> Which is precisely why we're having this debate; XPath and Namespaces don't
> play nicely with each other as currently written.

There's a difference between the XPath situation and the Namespaces
situation.  There's been a lot of resistance to the idea of changing the
Namespaces spec to make relative URIs anything less than first-class citizens,
on the grounds that doing so would break existing code and/or documents.  But
the same objection may not apply to changing XPath, or if it does apply, it
may not apply with the same force.  In fact, changing XPath to go with the
literal interpretation would bring James Clark's processor into conformance,
we've heard.  In retrospect, the idea of providing both namespace-uri and
namespace-name functions seems to be the most desirable solution.  The
question is: what would break were it to be adopted?

Paul Abrahams

Received on Wednesday, 14 June 2000 19:04:54 UTC