W3C is full of terrible standards: the verbose dom, the obtuse xml schema, the crippled css (you can't have a variable), and others. XPath isn't one of them. It

W3C is full of terrible standards: the verbose dom, the obtuse xml schema, the crippled css (you can't have a variable), and others. XPath isn't one of them. It is the best way to query XML documents in a forward compatible way. Maybe someday we will able to use XPath in a CSS file instead of their crazy selectors.