Following a long thread initiated by Charles Reitzel about the need of a XPath API and the suggestion made by several posts to define a XML encoding that could be returned by SAX XPath parsers, Wayne Steele posted a proposal ( DTD and examples) for such an encoding under the title "XML-Encoded XPath: an alternate syntax for XPath expressions".

This proposal doesn't use XPath syntax, but rather provides a straight XML representation of the concepts described in the XPath 1.0 recommendation:

• An XPath expression is broken into a sequence of location steps and represented as a multi-rooted set of location steps.
• Each location step contains the three parts (axis, node test and one of more predicates).
• The function calls are defined by their name and set of parameters.

Steele welcomes questions, comments and errata.

Related stories:

• Toward an XPath API (from XML.com)
• Replacement XPath processors, abstract XPath API
• XPath 1.0 errata