Re: [xml] XPath queries on document fragments without a document

[Sean Chittenden <sean chittenden org>]

> > > > [...]  my question is now: is there a reason to refuse xpath
> > > > queries on document fragments?
> > >
> > >   yes, the XPath semantic is not defined. For example what does "/"
> > > XPath evaluation should return ???  And an awful lot of XPath
> > > queries use / , /foo or //foo to start a lookup, no really, having
> > > element without a document breaks an awful lot of things in the XML
> > > infrastructure, each time I suggest not to do it, people do it
> > > anyway and have troubles, big surprise ...
> >
> > Return NULL on all queries that start with / and node->doc == NULL?  -sc
>
>   foo[ id = /bar/value]
>
>   and this breaks.
>
> THE SOLUTION, is to keep a surrounding document element, as well as
> a fake root element to encapsulate the well-balanced chunk and run the
> query on this perfectly well defined document. 

Ahh, heh.

> A document fragment ain't an XML document. Make it a document and
> everything becomes smooth,

Alrighty, groovy.  Just thought there could be an easy fix.  ::shrug::

Hey, fwiw, if anyone's interested in a libxml/libxslt bindings for
Ruby, let me know.  They're adhering to the C API so far but aren't
finished and should be pretty easy to use.  -sc

-- 
Sean Chittenden