Chapter 19. The System.Xml.XPath Namespace
XPath is a W3C specification for locating
nodes in an XML document. It provides an expression syntax that can
determine a node based on its type, location, and relation to other
nodes in a document. XPath is generally not useful alone, but works
in conjunction with other tools, especially XSLT. Figure 19-1 shows the types in this namespace.
System.Xml.XPath
provides types that evaluate expressions and match nodes in XML
documents. XPathDocument is a document object
designed to provide fast document navigation through XPath and is
used by the System.Xml.Xsl classes for XSLT
transformations. XPathNavigator is the core entry
point for doing XPath expressions; it is abstract, allowing for more
than just XML documents to be XPath-navigated. For example, an
ADO.NET provider could, if it desired, implement the
IXPathNavigable interface and return an
XPathNavigator that translated XPath queries into
a SQL SELECT statement.
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