"N(ot) O(nly) XML - Extending the relevance of XPath by breaking the chains of the DOM.


Presented at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2014, Washington, DC, August 5 - 8, 2014. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2014. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 13 (2014). doi:10.4242/BalisageVol13.Lee01.

Abstract

XPath is an ingenious invention and the core strength, if not the foundation, of the success of XML. Through its life it has been enhanced, redefined, specified, extended and embedded into nearly every XML technology. XPath and XDM (the data model of XPath 2.0 and XQuery 1.0) intricately bind XML (the serialization format) and XML technologies (the languages) into a powerful and successful set of Data Specific Languages (DSLs) that power the XML Ecosystem. It is this very success, however, that is both pushing the original boundaries of XML Processing and holding them back from the prominence they once claimed. The elegance and power of XPath is at risk as we push the use cases of what-was XML Only languages but are held back by an XML Only data model for XPath.