> In every single task I do that involves munching on XML with xpath
And more generally that's true of every single task involving muching on namespaced XML. Namespaces are a good idea implemented absolutely terribly.
XPath is a good idea well-implemented (no, XPath 2 does not exist, there is only one XPath). One of the few I've found in XML-land. I still hate that we have to use CSS selectors rather than XPath (although that's understandable considering CSS selectors predate XPath), most of the improvements since CSS1 were in XPath day 1, and the rest (pseudo-classes) could probably have been implemented using functions.
Also, that might have finally gotten us a non-eye-stabbing standard function for "match any item of a space-separated list in an attribute" (matching HTML classes in XPath without custom helpers is the worst)
And more generally that's true of every single task involving muching on namespaced XML. Namespaces are a good idea implemented absolutely terribly.
XPath is a good idea well-implemented (no, XPath 2 does not exist, there is only one XPath). One of the few I've found in XML-land. I still hate that we have to use CSS selectors rather than XPath (although that's understandable considering CSS selectors predate XPath), most of the improvements since CSS1 were in XPath day 1, and the rest (pseudo-classes) could probably have been implemented using functions.
Also, that might have finally gotten us a non-eye-stabbing standard function for "match any item of a space-separated list in an attribute" (matching HTML classes in XPath without custom helpers is the worst)