[webkit-dev] XPath Issues?

[Alex Milowski]

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Alexey Proskuryakov <ap at webkit.org> wrote:
>
> XPath 2.0 is not fully compatible with 1.0. JavaScript API for XPath doesn't provide a way to choose version - at least, it didn't when I last checked. So, we can't really support 2.0.
>

I'm not sure that turns out to be a real issue considering this
particular context.  I've been shopping this idea around here at the
W3C TPAC meeting and many of the incompatibilities may not occur
within the context of the browser with a pre-built DOM.  I'll have to
dig further on that.

It is certainly flawed that you can't choose a version.
Unfortunately, there isn't a good way to test for XPath 1.0 but you
can use an XPath 2.0 only expression to test for XPath 2.0 support.
This should be fixed in the API.

Also, we can't expect to stay at XPath 1.0 forever.

At any rate, this would be considered completely experimental.

-- 
--Alex Milowski
"The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
considered."

Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics