XML Pointer (XPointer) framework is a W3C recommended language to point to fragments of XML documents. It allows links to parts of documents by:

  • identifying XML fragments
  • addressing elements of the document
  • scheme for  namespaces
  • scheme for XPath expression.

The addressing of XPointer is way similar to XPath, as it make use of element name, attribute name…etc, however the XPointer helps in addressing document fragments rather than whole nodes. For example, instead of pointing to whole XML document, XPointer helps to point to nodes such as <employee>, <name>...etc which contains the value required. Since not only elements, but also few characters, part of element...etc can be addressed using XPointer, the document fragments to be addressed, are called location instead of nodes.

NOTE: XPointer does not have wide browser support yet, but it can be used by other XML languages.

 

 

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