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XPointer

System for addressing components of XML-based Internet media

Field	Value
title	XPointer
long_name	XPointer Framework
native_name	XPointer Framework
native_name_lang	en
status	W3C Recommendation
year_started
first_published
version	XPointer Framework Recommendation
version_date
organization	W3C
committee	W3C XML Linking Working Group
editors	{{Plainlist
}}<ref name	"W3C-xptr-framework" /
base_standards	XML, XPath
website

Paul Grosso
Eve Maler
Jonathan Marsh
Norman Walsh

XPointer is a system for addressing components of XML-based Internet media. It is divided among four specifications: a "framework" that forms the basis for identifying XML fragments, a positional element addressing scheme, a scheme for namespaces, and a scheme for XPath-based addressing. XPointer Framework is a W3C recommendation since March 2003.

The XPointer language is designed to address structural aspects of XML, including text content and other information objects created as a result of parsing the document. Thus, it could be used to point to a section of a document highlighted by a user through a mouse drag action.

During development, and until 2016, XPointer was covered by a royalty-free technology patent held by Sun Microsystems.

Positional element addressing

The element() scheme introduces positional addressing of child elements. This is similar to a simple XPath address, but subsequent steps can only be numbers representing the position of a descendant relative to its branch on the tree.

For instance, given the following fragment:

<foobar id="foo">
  <bar/>
  <baz>
    <bom a="1"/>
  </baz>
  <bom a="2"/>
</foobar>

results as the following examples:

xpointer(id("foo")) = foobar xpointer(/foobar/1) = bar xpointer(//bom) = bom (a=1), bom (a=2) element(/1/2/1) = bom (a=1) (/1 descend into first element (foobar), /2 descend into second child element (baz), /1 select first child element (bom))

References

(n.d.). "XPointer Framework Publication History - W3C".
(1997-04-06). "Extensible Markup Language (XML): Part 2. Linking Version 1.0".
"XPointer Framework". W3C.
(2000). "W3C XML Pointer, XML Base and XML Linking".
"The XML and Semantic Web Worlds: Technologies, Interoperability and Integration. A survey of the State of the Art".
(2002-06-10). "XPointer Patent Statements".
"XPointer element() Scheme". W3C.

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This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

world-wide-web-consortium-standards xml-data-access

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