NOTE: These slides have not been updated since 2003. They have been superseded by the book An Introduction to XML and Web Technologies Addison-Wesley, and the accompanying online material. Please see http://www.brics.dk/ixwt/ for more information. Anders Møller and Michael Schwartzbach, February 2006

THE XML REVOLUTION  -  TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE FUTURE WEB

XPointer: Context initialization

When evaluated, the initial context is defined as follows:

• the context node is the root node of the document
• the context position and size are both 1 (because the root has no siblings)
• the variable bindings are empty (variables are not used by XPointer)
• the function library consists of the core XPath functions + a few extra functions
• the namespace declarations are set as follows:
  xmlns(myprefix=http://mynamespace.org) xpointer(...)

Warning: several levels of character escaping occur when using XPointer in XML documents

• in XPointer, unbalanced parentheses must be escaped, e.g. ^)
• in URIs, many characters must be escaped, e.g. %20
• in XML attribute values, quotes, ampersand, etc. must be escaped, e.g. <

COPYRIGHT © 2000-2003 ANDERS MØLLER & MICHAEL I. SCHWARTZBACH