XML is simply markup for data. That's it. XML is not a magic wand; it does not specify how data is transmitted over the wire, it does not specify how data is stored. XML simply determines the format of the data: what you do with the data is up to you. That said, the real power behind XML is not solely its ability to represent data: XML's real power lies in ancillary technologies that, when combined with XML, provide robust solutions, and XPath is one of those ancillary technologies.
Version 1.0 of the XML Path Language became a World Wide Web
Abstract
XPath is a language for addressing parts of an XML document, designed to be used by both XSLT and XPointer.
Status of this document
This document has been reviewed by W3C Members and other interested parties and has been endorsed by the Director as a W3C Recommendation. It is a stable document and may be used as reference material or cited as a normative reference from other documents. W3C's role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the
The History of XSL
Like most of the XML family of standards, XSLT was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a coalition of companies orchestrated by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web. There is an interesting page on the history of XSL, and styling proposals generally, at http://www.w3.org/Style/History/.
Pre-history
HTML was originally conceived by Berners-Lee as a set of tags to mark the logical structure of a document: headings, paragraphs, links, quotes, code sections, and the like. Soon people wanted more control over how
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