In the development of XML based websites, there may at some point in time be a need for selecting particular nodes from an XML document rather than the entire document. The specification that is needed to handle this node selection is that of the XPath. Furthermore, XPath is also fully capable of handling other tasks such as the computing of strings, Boolean values as well as even numbers.
For anyone who has looked at an XML document in the past, you can see that its structure is basically like that of a tree. When using the XPath technology, you can select entries from on the XML document by determining the criteria for that selection. In its original development, XPath was created as a means of streamlining and providing a common syntax for the behaviours between the XPointer technology from Sun Microsystems and that of XSLT. Since its initial development, it has since been accepted by the World Wide Web Consortium and has been expanded for use in a number of other XML schemes like that of the XForms.
It was back in 1999 when XPath 1.0 was introduced to the World Wide Web. This original version was usually called from a particular API, using languages like C#, Java as well as JavaScript. It could also be implemented through various embedded languages as well.
Today we are currently using the XPath 2.0 version which was accepted by the W3C at the beginning of 2007. While XPath 2.0 may be much larger and more robust of a language, there are still a number of developments which still make use of the older XPath 1.0.
The major difference between the two versions is that XPath 2.0 allows for a larger library of functions as well as operators which makes it able to support a richer selection of type sets. It was actually developed as a subset of the commonly used XQuerry before becoming the 2nd version of XPath.
Original Authors: Nick
Edit Update Authors: M.A.Harris
Updated On: 04/03/2009
