> > Actually, I think that the set of "people apart from Mike" who've
> > expressed that opinion currently consists only of Matthew. I'd like

> Well, I was the first one to try to gag on this proposal. I agree that this
> is a very powerful tool to stick in SRW. I also think that the examples are
> just a little forced. But, I think it slips in very elegantly into SRW.

Most of them assume knowledge of the data rather than being searches
from out of the blue, I agree 100%. A lot of things could be jammed into
DC. And even more into DCX. But there's no guarantee you'll get anything
useful unless you ask for it specifically.

> I'm not an XPath expert, so answer me a question first. Will you be able to
> specify a list of fields to return with a single XPath expression? If the

Yep.
    /xhtml/head/title | /xhtml/body/h1[1]
will match both of the page title and first h1 elements.

You can also do it lower down with operators:
    /ead/archdesc/dsc/*[starts-with(name(),'c')]
to match all of the elements that start with 'c'

I highly recommend
  http://www.zvon.org/xxl/XPathTutorial/General/examples.html
and
  http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery-operators/
has the bazillion operators defined for XPath 2.0, most of which we don't
need or want, but some are useful. (like the string, number and
aggregator functions)

Rob

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