On Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:42:59 -0000, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalm...@gmail.com>
wrote:
My stated goal was to argue that working on XPath is a bad idea
You can argue that it's wasted effort or duplicated by CSS Selectors
(although XPath is already specified, implemented and deployed unlike the
new Selector features), but it goes a long way for you to claim it is a
*bad* idea.
I still think you are underestimating XPath. There are things possible in
XPath today that will never be possible with Selectors in the
unforeseeable future, like a parent selector, or doing a case insensitive
substring match of a node's text content (from any descendant).
If you're suggesting forking Selectors into the ones used in stylesheet,
and the others used in the Selector API, then it is repeated effort and a
*bad* idea because those use cases are already covered today with already
deployed XPath and its DOM 3 XPath API, which is convoluted and hard to
use, which is what people are trying to make friendlier. And it would
definitely confuse everyone, because then developers would need to know
which features they can use in stylesheets and which they cannot.
