Foxpath integration

[ChristianGruen]

This is a placeholder issue for Syd Bauman’s suggestion on Slack to integrate Foxpath, or parts of it, in the standard.

[ndw]

On the assumption that Slack will eventually push the conversation behind a paywall, here at least is Syd's initial comment:

I feel a little remiss in not paying serious attention to the XSLT 4 (and XPath 4) effort. On the other hand, I am not nearly enough of a hard-core programmer to have much to contribute. That said, there is something I want from XSLT 4 — I do not it want it to rely on XPath as the language for expressions and patterns, I want it to rely on FOXpath by
@Hans-Jürgen Rennau
.
I will not be remotely surprised if one of you folks in the CG explains why this cannot really be done, and there is no point in my even submitting a feature request on GitHub. But I think the power and elegance of being able to say <xsl:apply-templates select="\published~ articles\volume*\issue*\bibl.xml[.//tei:biblStruct] //tei:imprint"/> seems just awesome.

In truth I would prefer something a bit more elegant,[1] but would even be happy with just the addition of fox:foxpath()[2] to XPath 4. (Which essentially adds the power without the elegance.)

Notes
[1] My instinct is to simplify the syntax by using a special namespace to differentiate file system name tests from document node name tests, and to skip most of the escaping rules and just say that any of the special characters that have path semantics (like ‘[’, ‘]’, ‘*’, ‘(’, ‘)’, etc.) need to be percent-encoded (i.e., “%5B”, “%5D”, “%2A”, “%28”, “%29”, etc.). After all, the thing is supposed to be like a URI. Thus /fi:published%20articles/fi:volume*/fi:issue*/fi:bibl.xml[.//tei:biblStruct]//tei:imprint instead, where the fi: prefix is bound to the super-special “this thing is really part of the filesystem, not the document” namespace, urn:xml:qt4cg:foxpath:4.0 or whatever.

[2] Described a few paragraphs before Appendix A in the Balisage paper linked to above.

[michaelhkay]

My feeling is that this doesn't hit a cost/benefit target.

[ndw]

The CG agreed to close this issue without action meeting 062