Re: [xsl] Should "//ename[n]" mean "/descendant::e name"?]

[David Carlisle <davidc at nag dot co dot uk>]

> I would love to come up with a definition 
> that would allow //para[1] to mean the first paragraph in the document, but 
> my proposed definition does not do that cleanly.

I accept yor later points that there are some aspects of xpath 1.0 that
are rather contrived and it may be acceptable to break things a bit,
but // is such core functionality you can't change this and call it
Xpath. You can't re-phrase your definition to make it cleaner as the
basic aim is, I fear, a non starter.

A Qname in Xpath, if it isn't being a function name or prefixed with an
axis or variable $ token, is always shorthand for the child axis. Your
definition (or any similar one) would break that. 

In XSLT patterns, a // at the front of the expression never does anything
useful. This is a FAQ answer that your definittion would make incorrect.

Any stylesheet that currently uses // and [] together would silently
produce the wrong result, so detecting how many stylesheets you'd broken
would be difficult.


However I've just printed off a few hundred pages of xpath/xslt/xquery
documents, so something to read over Christmas, more comments later I
expect:-)

David

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