Going through nearly one thousand website scrapping I identified some cases where XPath look mandatory to me :
search in ancestors of a node
going through a flat structure (with following-sibling)
selecting a node from its content
specifying the 2nd text child of a node
and even getting some content out of HTML comments
The good news is that there is nothing worst behind XPath. I don't have use-cases for something fancier or weirder… after HTML and RSS we hardly encounter worse than JSON on the web, except for multipart/form-data content-types in some POST requests.
To connect #73 and #143 I can testify that it exists real-life use-cases for XPathEvaluators, such as reaching namespaced elements in an RSS file.
The
.evaluate()
function is provided on DOM nodes in Firefox : https://developer.mozilla.org/fr/docs/Web/API/Document/evaluateThat would be great to have it here also.
Going through nearly one thousand website scrapping I identified some cases where XPath look mandatory to me :
The good news is that there is nothing worst behind XPath. I don't have use-cases for something fancier or weirder… after HTML and RSS we hardly encounter worse than JSON on the web, except for multipart/form-data content-types in some POST requests.