This article provides a brief tour through some of the new features in XPath 2.0. It assumes that you already have a basic understanding of XPath 1.0, and that you've most likely used it in the context of XSLT. It is by no means an exhaustive overview but merely points out some of the most noteworthy features.

When using XSLT templates, it's often necessary to perform transformations that are more complex than simple one-to-one entity maps.

XPath, as its name implies, is a syntax for defining the parts of an XML document. Just like the "path" of a document on your computer, an element of an XML database can have its place in the hierarchy defined using a combination of slashes and dots.

XPath is the equivalent of SQL for the XML world. Martin Gudgin of DevelopMentor demonstrates how it allows you to query XML documents, and how to use it from MSXML.

XSLT and XPath are gaining a reputation for helping developers tie into web and web services applications. But one of the drawbacks of using these tools is that developers think they need to be XML experts.

Programs that process parts of XML documents, instead of entire XML documents, often require the users specify the parts to be processed. For example, let's say we have a telephone directory program that can select and print entries from an XML phone directory, and it looks something like this:

I run some training courses for developers in Singapore and have a web site that contains information about all the courses available. There are a couple of different courses and I simply maintain them in plain text files although storing all these information in a database seems like a better idea.

Examining working stylesheets can help us understand how we use XSLT and XPath to perform transformations. This article first dissects some example stylesheets before introducing basic terminology and design principles.

The following more complex examples are meant merely as illustrations of some of the powerful facilities and techniques available in XSLT. These samples expose concepts such as variables, functions, and process control constructs a stylesheet writer uses to effect the desired result, but does not attempt any tutelage in their use.

Examining working stylesheets can help us understand how we use XSLT and XPath to perform transformations. This article first dissects some example stylesheets before introducing basic terminology and design principles.

In the first part of this article, we introduced XPath and discussed various XPath queries ranging from simple to complex. By applying XPath queries to sample XML files, we elaborated upon various important definitions of XPath such as location step, context node, location path, axes, and node-test. We then discussed complex XPath queries that combine more than one simple query.

The .NET platform includes full XPath support, so developers can easily combine .NET and XML to locate necessary information. Here's how it works.

Extracting and formatting XML data does not require Java or Visual Basic. XPath provides everything you need with built-in functions to get the job done.

The theme of my talk last month at the Open Source Content Management conference (OSCOM) was: "Everything you need to know about content management, you (should have) learned in grade school." I spent a lot of time talking about why and how to use URIs and HTML document titles in principled ways. These two namespaces are metadata stores that we typically fail to manage, but that can deliver powerful benefits.

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.

XPath allows you to quickly locate and extract information from an XML hierarchy, and it offers extended functionality via its built-in functions, which provide an easy way to work with numeric and textual data.

Kirk Allen Evans, author of "XML and ASP.NET", presents the fundamentals of XPath—one of the ancilliary technologies that is the true power of XML.

In this article, we'll examine the XPath custom tag library for JSPs and see a tag collection that provides simple control constructs and a uniform attribute value substitution facility, all of which combine to reduce complexity and improve functionality. Additionally, this enables a clear separation between the roles of a page author and a programmer.

Learn the basics about XPath and XPointer, and learn how to locate elements that represent schema components.

XML Path Language (or XPath) is a W3C standard that primarily allows identifying parts of an XML document. This means that if you have an XML document and would like to locate one or more nodes, you can use XPath to do that. In addition, XPath is also used for numerical calculations, string manipulations, testing boolean conditions, etc.