No other book provides such excellent explanations of such topics as XInclude, XPath, XLink, and
XPointers. Coauthor Harold, by the way, is responsible for nearly half of the early implementations of XInclude, a method for combining several documents into one large XML document.
Their combined results include the W3C XML Linking Recommendation, the W3C XML Base Recommendation, and now,
XPointer.
With X-Hive's existing support of W3C standards such as XLink,
XPointer, XPath, and a recent release of its XQuery implementation demo, the launch of X-Hive/DB 2.0 widens the gap in the XML database market.
The second area is XPath (XML Path Language), which provides a common syntax and semantics for the functionally shared by XSL transformations and
XPointer (XML Pointer language).
DeRose in particular gives us the most up-to-date overview of the XLink,
XPointer, and XPath recommendations, explaining how they enable many of the important features of hypertext systems not seen previously, such as one-to-many links, "out-of-line" or externalized links, and calculations of link positions [DeRose 1999].
Furthermore, in combination with XLink,
XPointer and style sheets, XML allows for the reuse of specific document excerpts, the complete and partial synchronization of their different instances as well as for contextual connections.
The author explains the usual XML concepts of elements, attributes, entities, Document Type Definitions, XML Schema, XML namespaces, XPath, translation, XLink,
XPointer, and other XML-related topics.