On Mon, 21 Nov 2011 23:18:06 +0100, James Robinson <[email protected]>
wrote:
XPath is dead on the web. Let's leave it that way.
Are you referring to the XPath that many Selector libraries use internally
? Do you have real hard data to support a baseless statement like that ?
XPath is not popular because one of the major browser never supported it
beyond XSLT, which is IE.
And the DOM 3 XPath API is extremelly hideous to use. So, no wonder XPath
has been wrapped and hidden away from developers.
Still, far from dead.
On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:34:24 +0100, Tab Atkins Jr. <[email protected]>
wrote:
We don't want to reuse our XPath code in webkit. We would like to not
use it at all, because it's unmaintained, buggy, and duplicates
functionality with Selectors. I suspect that other vendors feel
roughly the same.
That's completely irrelevant to this discussing. If your code is
problematic, then it's your responsability to maintain it.
On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:23:00 +0100, Marcos Caceres <[email protected]> wrote:
On Nov 21, 2011 11:29 PM, "Martin Kadlec" <[email protected]> wrote:
Selectors won the "select some nodes from a document" battle *years*
ago. There's no longer any reason to try and support alternative
technologies that solve the same problem. It's much more worth our
time to improve the spec and implemention of Selectors.
Only reason why XPath is "dead" on the web is because there is not (yet)
easy way to use it.
Sure there is: it's called CSS.
Sure there isn't. Selectors (not CSS) are not as flexible and feature rich
as XPath.
XPath is not dead, but some people seem too eager to kill it. XPath will
continue to be supported by browsers while there is XSLT support and the
DOM XPath API, so there is no point is trying to hinder proposals to make
the XPath API more useful.
