THE XML REVOLUTION - TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE FUTURE WEB

Extra XPointer features

XPointer provides a more fine-grained addressing than XPath.

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.