What is XPointer

• What is XPointer?
• Example of XPointer.

• XPointer allows the links to point to specific parts of an XML document
• XPointer is a W3C Recommendation
• XPointer uses XPath expressions to navigate in the XML document

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<employees> 
<employee id="e001"> 
<image url="http://payroll.com/john.gif" /> 
<name>John</name> 
<age>20</age> 
</employee> 

<employee id="e002"> 
<image url="http://payroll.com/james.gif" /> 
<name>James</name> 
<age>30</age> 
</employee> 
</employees>

So, instead of linking to the entire document (as with XLink), XPointer allows us to link to specific parts of the document. To link to a specific part of a page, add a number sign (#) and an XPointer expression after the URL in the xlink:href attribute, like this: xlink:href=”http://payroll.com/employees.xml#xpointer(id(‘e001’))”. The expression refers to the element in the target document, with the id value of “e001″.
XPointer also allows a shorthand method for linking to an element with an id. we can use the value of the id directly, like this: xlink:href=”http://payroll.com/employees.xml#e001”.