Sunday, October 25, 2009

Mozilla firefox and XPath namespace axis

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen shared with us, that Mozilla Firefox browser doesn't implement the XPath namespace axis (ref, http://cmsmcq.com/mib/?p=757). CMSMcQ has encouraged us to cast a vote on Mozilla forum, to push Firefox team, to implement XPath namespace axis. I agree with CMSMcQ, and also find that XPath namespace axis is quite a critical functionality for XPath data model. This is certainly true for XPath 1.0, where namespace axis is very critical (and Mozilla, implements XPath 1.0). In XPath 2.0, namespace axis is deprecated but namespace nodes still is a core part of, XPath 2.0 data model as well.

I have already casted my vote for this with my support at, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94270.

Other's might follow, please.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Martin Fowler: UML Distilled, 3rd Edition

I have been reading Martin Fowler's book, "UML Distilled, 3rd Edition" since last few months (my book reading has been very slow, keeping in mind the time I spend on web these days, to do most of my learnings).

This is a great UML book (and has only, 175 pages but very good), and I recommend it to anybody wanting to know about UML (Unified Modeling Language).

How XPath compare values in prediates

A user asked question similar to following, on IBM developerWorks XQuery and XPath forum:

What does A = B and A != B mean in XPath expressions?

Michael Kay provided a very nice explanation to this:
The operators "=" and "!=" in XPath use "implicit existential quantification". So A=B is shorthand for "some $a in A, $b in B satisfies $a eq $b" (the longhand form is legal in XPath 2.0), while A!=B is shorthand for "some $a in A, $b in B satisfies $a ne $b".

So, not(A=B) is true if there is no pair of items from A and B that are equal, while (A!=B) is true if there is a pair of values that are not equal. In practice, you nearly always want not(A=B).