Inside XML

All About XPointers

In the beginning of this chapter, I took a look at a link that used an XPointer to locate a specific element in a document; that example looked like this:

<MOVIE_REVIEW xmlns:xlink = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
    xlink:type = "simple"
    xlink:show = "new"
    xlink:href = "http://www.starpowdermovies.com/reviews.xml#
        xpointer(/child::*[position()=126]/child::*[position()=first()])">
    Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
</MOVIE_REVIEW>

You can see the XPointer part here:

xpointer(/child::*[position()=126]/child::*[position()=first()])

This XPointer is appended to the URI I'm using here, following a # character.

You might notice that this XPointer expression looks a lot like the XPath expressions we used in Chapter 13, and with ...