Though you do not have to be familiar with XPath to use the XSLT Mapper, you may benefit from some knowledge of XPath when building advanced expressions in XSLT. On the Web, you will find numerous publications dedicated to XSLT and related topics. Most books on XSLT contain sections on XPath. For a complete description of XPath and how to use it, read the W3C XML Path Language specification. This document is available at http://www.w3.org.
While XPath and XSLT are defined as separate specifications by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), XPath
Now that we are successfully using XML to mark up our information according to our own vocabularies, we are taking control and responsibility for our information, instead of abdicating such control to product vendors. These vendors would rather lock our information into their proprietary schemes to keep us beholden to their solutions and technology.But the flexibility inherent in the power given to each of us to develop our own vocabularies, and for industry associations, e-commerce consortia, and the W3C to develop their own vocabularies, presents the
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
RSS/XML