An introductory XPointer tutorial, and a growing list of resources. Stay up to date by subscribing to the RSS feed.

An introduction to XPointer.

W3C has acknowledged receipt of a technical submission from ISOGEN International describing an XML Indirection Facility. As presented in the published W3C Note, XIndirect is "a simple mechanism for using XML to represent indirect addresses in order to augment the core functionality of XLink and XPointer without requiring either of those specifications to themselves require support for indirect addresses.

This paper explains inline and out-of-line linking. It discusses the most important issues to consider when authoring and managing link information, comparing the inline approach to the out-of-line approach.

The XML Pipeline Definition Language 1.0-based pipeline1() scheme is intended to be used within the XPointer Framework[14] to support the addressing of nodes within XML documents. Pointer parts using the pipeline1() scheme will always fail, as they do not identify portions of an XML document, but they can communicate (though not enforce) expectations for processing of later parts of an XPointer.

This document presents requirements for the XPointer language. XPointer provides ways to directly identify any node, data, or selection in any XML document by describing its structure and context. An identified data location is called a "target."

The simple HTML one-way link mechanism is too limited for the XML world. We need to be able to express link relationships when we might not have write access to either the source or the destination. Sometimes we need one-to-many links.

The W3C XML Linking Working Group has released four Working Drafts relating to XPointer. W3C XPointer "supports addressing into the internal structures of XML documents, allowing for traversals of a document tree and choice of its internal parts based on various properties, such as element types, attribute values, character content, and relative position."

Some notes about XLinks and XPointers

This specification defines the XML Pointer Language (XPointer), the language to be used as the basis for a fragment identifier for any URI reference that locates a resource of Internet media type text/xml or application/xml.

XPointer is a W3C proposed standard for the addressing of arbitrary fragments of XML documents. XPointer extends XPath, which is used to address nodes, and adds support for single positions within a text node (the so-called points) and ranges within and across element nodes.

The W3C XML Linking Working Group has announced the release of XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0 as a W3C Candidate Recommendation. The CR replaces the second last-call Working Draft version of January 08, 2001, and is open for public comment through March 4, 2002. XPointer is "built on top of the XML Path Language (XPath), which is an expression language underlying the XSL Transformations (XSLT) language.

The W3C's XPointer, a language used to reference XML fragments, has entered Candidate Recommendation phase, where implementation experience is solicited from developers.

A software component that incorporates or uses an XPointer processor because it needs to access XML subresources. The occurrence and usage of XPointers, and the behavior to be applied to resources and subresources obtained by processing those XPointers, are governed by the definition of each application's corresponding data format (which could be XML-based or non-XML-based). For example, HTML Web browsers and XInclude processors are applications that might use XPointer processors.

This is an overview about XPointer on PDF format.

The XML Linking WG has just published four XPointer Working Drafts, representing the dissection of XPointer into a general framework and multiple independent schemes: element(), xmlns(), and xpointer().

Unlike its companions XLink and XML Base, XPointer has retreated from Candidate Recommendation to Last Call Working Draft status.

The XML Pointer Language (XPointer) is the language to be used as the basis for a fragment identifier for any URI reference that locates a resource of Internet media type text/xml or application/xml.

XLink and XPointer seem ready to move forward after Daniel Veillard released the decisions of the XML Linking Working Group regarding the comments on the XLink and XPointer CRs.

The much delayed XPointer specification has broken into four pieces, including an XPointer Framework and three schemes - xmlns(), element(), and xpointer(), with all but the last in Last Call.