The W3C has released an erratum for the XPath 1.0 recommendation that formalizes the W3C XML Plenary decision to depreciate the usage of relative URIs as namespaces identifier.

James Clark has announced this erratum on the xsl-list as containing "nothing major", and its main topic is a careful reformulation of the text about namespaces to reflect the decision of the XML plenary.

Although the word "deprecation" isn't mentioned, the following disclaimer has been added:

The namespace URI component of an expanded-name is implementation-dependent if the expanded-name is expanded from a QName whose prefix is declared by a namespace declaration with a namespace name that is a relative URI (with or without a fragment identifier). An XPath expression that depends on the value of the namespace URI component of such expanded-names is not interoperable.

The erratum is also fixing some typos and provides additional specifications to the following points:

• Unary minus
• * and div operators
• start-with, contains, substring-before and substring-after, floor and ceiling functions
• whitespace outside the document element.