Jürgen Kahrs - 2006-03-21

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On 2006-03-21, Manuel explained his proposal:
My suggestion was in fact a deviation with respect standard
XPath. The proposal was to have both leading and trailing
slashes. XMLPATH can start as "/", and add "element_name/"
for each inner level.

Rationale: This way it is a little easier to write REs that
match element tag patterns in the path. Think about looking
for a "para" ancestor-or-self tag in a document that also
contains "spara" elements. Using word boundaries (>, \<)
can help, but we must also consider namespaces (like in
db:para).

Anyway, I'm not sure if adding a trailing slash is a good
idea. And if it is not added, then an initial null "" value
for XMLPATH is possibly a more uniform approach, albeit non
XPath standard.