Real World XML

XPointers

XLinks let you link to a particular document, but you often need to be more precise than that. XPointers let you point to specific locations inside a document—without having to modify that document by embedding special tags or markers.

To point to a specific location in a document, the XPointer specification builds on the XPath specification. As you recall, we covered the XPath specification in Chapter 13; it let you identify specific nodes in a document with expressions such as /child::*[position()=126]/child::*[position() =first()].

XPointers are in the W3C candidate recommendation stage. As of this writing, the version is September 11, 2001. You can find the most current version of this specification at www.w3.org/TR/xptr. Here's ...