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
The XPath specification is the foundation for a variety of specifications, including XSLT and linking/addressing specifications such as XPointer. So an understanding of XPath is fundamental to a lot of advanced XML usage. This section provides a thorough introduction to XPath in the context of XSLT so that you can refer to it as needed.
Note: In this tutorial, you won't actually use XPath until later, in the section, Transforming XML Data with XSLT. So, if you like, you can skip this section and go on ahead to the next section, Writing Out a DOM as
Abstract
XPath 2.0 is an expression language that allows the processing of values conforming to the data model defined in [XQuery/XPath Data Model (XDM)]. The data model provides a tree representation of XML documents as well as atomic values such as integers, strings, and booleans, and sequences that may contain both references to nodes in an XML document and atomic values. The result of an XPath expression may be a selection of nodes from the input documents, or an atomic value, or more generally, any sequence allowed by the data model. The name of
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