What Happened to XPath?
webreflection.medium.com
What Happened to XPath?
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Re: What Happened to XPath?
#2XPath post 1.0 got ridiculous, like many things do. What started with a simple, elegant language morphed into one with a http client, filesystem methods, json support, functions, loops, extensions and the ability to read environment variables.
I wrote a post about it a while back[1] (I regret some of the wording used there) and maintain a tool[2] that can exploit XPath injection issues. I'd recommend sticking with 1 or maybe 2, and pretending 3.x doesn't exist.
1. https://tomforb.es/xcat-1.0-released-or-xpath-injection-issu...
Re: What Happened to XPath?
#3It's hard not to read this as satire, because XPath is so inelegant. Not that CSS selectors are a model of elegance, but it gets the job done (most of the time) and is easy enough for rookie devs and designers to pick up.
Re: What Happened to XPath?
#4Anyone who does scraping or automated browser work eventually comes across XPath.
In some ways, XPath is like regex. It's got insane power, but comes with a relatively steep learning curve. Remember reading regex for the first time? What? But unlike regex, the number of people using it are few in comparison.
I avoided XPath until I couldn't anymore. I could do a lot with CSS selectors, but eventually the DOM traversal became difficult to reason about w/ just CSS.
After taking the dive, it's so powerful. Read a single XPath and like regex, you can fully understand what the thing is going after and how it will get there.
There are functions in XPath 2.0 that I would love to have, but Nokogiri for Rails is stuck in 1.0 world with no plan to go to 2.0. Sad, but I'll live.
Re: What Happened to XPath?
#5I thought XPath was pretty terrific for the day. It let you transform XML into a user interface in an entirely declarative way -- not just the appearance of items like CSS but the actual content could be inspected and altered. I built some cool things in XPath before frameworks like Angular took over.
Re: What Happened to XPath?
#6With increasing power comes the likelihood that people accidentally implement behavior that is nonpolynomial. It looks good in testing but then with real live data starts taking seconds to render/re-render. There are probably examples of this already in CSS but seems more likely with arbitrarily backtracking XPath expressions.
Re: What Happened to XPath?
#7This is that weird language you use to make WebDAV servers look okay in a browser, right?
Re: What Happened to XPath?
#8I thought XPath was pretty terrific for the day. It let you transform XML into a user interface in an entirely declarative way -- not just the appearance of items like CSS but the actual content could be inspected and altered. I built some cool things in XPath before frameworks like Angular took over.
XPath is still a great way to reach into an xml file and grab a value
Re: What Happened to XPath?
#9This is that weird language you use to make WebDAV servers look okay in a browser, right?
I think you're referring to XSL. The heavy lifting is done by the transformation language (XSLT), but XPath is definitely an underlying tool.
Re: What Happened to XPath?
#10XPath post 1.0 got ridiculous, like many things do. What started with a simple, elegant language morphed into one with a http client, filesystem methods, json support, functions, loops, extensions and the ability to read environment variables. I wrote a post about it a while back[1] (I regret some of the wording used there) and maintain a tool[2] that can exploit XPath injection issues. I'd recommend sticking with 1…
I've read your article... Holy shit. They took a simple, sed-like tool and turned it into an abomination.