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> Also, that might have finally gotten us a non-eye-stabbing standard function for "match any item of a space-separated list in an attribute" CSS handles this

> Also, that might have finally gotten us a non-eye-stabbing standard function for "match any item of a space-separated list in an attribute" CSS handles this rather nicely: [class~=foo] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Attribute_selectors https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Attribute_s...

masklinn 13y ago
Whereas xpath... does not. Which is a severe understatement considering the equivalent to the CSS selector you wrote up (or to `.foo`) in xpath 1 is something along the lines of: [contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), ' foo ')] the normalize-space can be dropped IIF you're certain all spaces are normalized, the spaces around the needle not. xpath 2 does quite a bit better through `tokenize`: //*[tokenize(@class, '\s+')='foo'] but still not great. And god forbid you need to match multiple classes in the same selector. [0] or xpath 1 + exslt if your xpath implementation provides it. exslt actually does slightly better as the pattern is optional and defaults to whitespace characters
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  Over in .NET land we appear to be stuck on XPath 1.0 forever. A project I used to work on used it extensively, but I now use the HtmlAgilityPack (badly formatted HTML) or XDocument (XHTML strict or XML) where I have the choice.
  - masklinn 13y ago
    > Over in .NET land we appear to be stuck on XPath 1.0 forever. I don't think it's a bad idea, most of the improvements in XPath 2 are the new standard functions which depending on your XPath implementation may be available as extensions (e.g. tokenize comes from exslt, an xpath 1.0 library) but along with that it brings significantly higher complexity and I think the spec has gone from "difficult to read" to "meaningless word-salad". I really like XPath, but I can't say I was impressed by XPath 2, it loses much of xpath's simplicity with little to show for the added complexity.

masklinn 13y ago

Whereas xpath... does not. Which is a severe understatement considering the equivalent to the CSS selector you wrote up (or to `.foo`) in xpath 1 is something along the lines of: [contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), ' foo ')] the normalize-space can be dropped IIF you're certain all spaces are normalized, the spaces around the needle not. xpath 2 does quite a bit better through `tokenize`: //*[tokenize(@class, '\s+')='foo'] but still not great. And god forbid you need to match multiple classes in the same selector. [0] or xpath 1 + exslt if your xpath implementation provides it. exslt actually does slightly better as the pattern is optional and defaults to whitespace characters

voltagex_ 13y ago
Over in .NET land we appear to be stuck on XPath 1.0 forever. A project I used to work on used it extensively, but I now use the HtmlAgilityPack (badly formatted HTML) or XDocument (XHTML strict or XML) where I have the choice.
- masklinn 13y ago
  > Over in .NET land we appear to be stuck on XPath 1.0 forever. I don't think it's a bad idea, most of the improvements in XPath 2 are the new standard functions which depending on your XPath implementation may be available as extensions (e.g. tokenize comes from exslt, an xpath 1.0 library) but along with that it brings significantly higher complexity and I think the spec has gone from "difficult to read" to "meaningless word-salad". I really like XPath, but I can't say I was impressed by XPath 2, it loses much of xpath's simplicity with little to show for the added complexity.