XPath 1.0

XPath 1.0 was published as a W3C Recommendation on the same day as XSLT 1.0: 16 November 1999. The two specifications were necessarily closely related because of the intimate way in which XPath expressions are embedded in XSLT stylesheets. However, XPath was deliberately published as a free-standing document, with the expectation that it could be used in many contexts other than XSLT. In fact, the original decision to make XPath separate from XSLT was motivated by the fact that XSLT and XPointer (the hyperlink format used by the XLink specification for document linking) were developing different languages that had a high degree of functional overlap, and everyone agreed that it would be better if W3C defined a single basic language ...

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