XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[John Cowan <jcowan AT reutershealth.com>]

Elliotte Harold scripsit:

> My thought here is to simply restrict all queries to location paths and 
> multiple location paths separated by |. (I wish there were a name for 
> this.) Is there an alternative to this? Would it be useful to allow 
> other XPath expressions that return node-sets, even if they're not full 
> location paths?

I recommend that you allow anything that matches the Pattern rule in
XSLT 1.0.  This is pretty close to what you describe (it restricts
you to /, //, and @, but allows id() and key() at the top level --
you might want to just have key() match nothing, though).

> My current thinking is that variables simply will not be bound.  

Agreed.

> Also a possibility is that the query will simply inherit the namespace 
> bindings of the context node,

I like this idea.

> but even if XOM does this, it still wouldn't handle the default
> namespace.

Neither XOM nor XPath has any notion of the default namespace (an NCName
in an XPath refers to the namespace named "", not anything else --
a frequent source of bugs in XPaths).

Everything else looks fine.

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