XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0

XPath 2.0 is an expression language that allows the processing of values conforming to the data model defined in the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model (XDM). The data model provides a tree representation of XML documents as well as atomic values such as integers, strings, and booleans, and sequences that may contain both references to nodes in an XML document and atomic values. The result of an XPath expression may be a selection of nodes from the input documents, or an atomic value, or more generally, any sequence allowed by the data model. The name of the language derives from its most distinctive feature, the path expression, which provides a means of hierarchic addressing of the nodes in an XML tree. XPath 2.0 is a superset of XPath 1.0, with the added capability to support a richer set of data types, and to take advantage of the type information that becomes available when documents are validated using XML Schema. A backwards compatibility mode is provided to ensure that nearly all XPath 1.0 expressions continue to deliver the same result with XPath 2.0; exceptions to this policy are noted in Section I (Backwards Compatibility with XPath 1.0).