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Match Patterns (Locating Elements)
One critical capability of a stylesheet language is to locate source elements to be styled. CSS, for example, does this with "selectors." FOSIs do it with "e-i-c's", elements in context. XSLT does it with "match patterns" defined by XPath.
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XPath has an extensible string-based syntax inspired, in part, by the common "path/file" file system syntax:
- para
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Matches all <para> children in the current context
- para/emphasis
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Matches all <emphasis> elements that have a parent of <para>
- ancestor-or-self::*/@sepchar
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Matches the sepchar attribute on the current element or any ancestor of the current element
- numberedlist/listitem[position() mod 2 = 0]
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Matches odd listitems in a numbered list.