Subject: [netmod] canonical xpath

From: Martin Bjorklund <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:32:54 -0700 (PDT)

Hi,

Searching for canonical xpath, it seems that this term is used as in
"canonical xpath for a given node in a document".  There are of course
many ways to construct an XPath expression that returns a node set
which contains just a given node, so they have defined a "canonical
xpath" for this.  See
e.g. http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-xforms-20010608/slice6.html#expr-canonical.

This is not what we were looking for.

We are using the term 'instance-identifer' for this.

A better match is this:

  The short-form of XPATH (and what most of us usually see) is
  actually the "abbreviated syntax"
  (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#path-abbrev) for a location path.  Some
  applications call these "canonical" XPath expressions.

(http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/provision/200502/msg00020.html)

But it is not really the same thing, they use it to differentiate it
from "full xpath".  And it doesn't handle the prefix problem.

/martin