What do you call a singer formerly of a 70's female band? Xpointer Sister

By now you'll be familiar with our innovative 'Hello World' theme. But here we're going to delight you by combining both of the previous pages into one bi-lingual greeting...

Try this application here

This application is a variation on the previous two. The first instruction is exactly the same as in the first application. It copies hello.xml to this:response. The second instruction introduces the use of URI references with xpointers. Xpointers are a standard that allow Xpath references to be incorporated in URI's to specify a location within an XML resource.

The <operand> URI has an xpointer to the <h1> element containing 'Bonjour Tout Les Mondes' in the bonjour.xml document. The <target> URI has an xpointer to a part of the this:response document. In this example this:response already contains the result of the first instruction ie hello.xml the second instruction is then placed at the xpath /html/body/i which has the result of replacing the italicised message seen in the first application with the French greeting.

With xpointer we can source document fragments from any location in the operand and place them at any location within the response document, provided of course that the xpath location exists.

Summary

In this section we've learned that an XML resource can be qualified by an xpath expression in the form of an Xpointer. The result of an instruction can be placed in the target at the xpath location specified.

In the next section we introduce literal documents...