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THE XML REVOLUTION  -  TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE FUTURE WEB

Extra XPointer features

• Instead of just nodes, XPointers address locations, which can be nodes, points, or ranges.

• A point can represent the location preceding or following any individual character in e.g. chardata nodes.
  The special node test
    point()
  selects the set of points of a node.

• A range consists of two points in the same document, and is specified using a special range-to location step construct.

• XPointer provides some extra functions:
  

  here()		get location of element containing current XPointer
  origin()		get location where user initiated link traversal
  start-point(location-set)		get start point of location set
  string-range(...)		find matching substrings
  ...

Example:

/descendant::text()/point()[position()=0]

selects the locations right before the first character of all character data nodes in the document.

Example:

/section[1] / range-to(/section[3])

selects everything from the beginning of the first section to the end of the third.

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