From: Aaron Patterson <aaron@...>
Date: 2009-01-11T05:48:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Help with HTML parsing

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 04:09:54AM +0900, Phlip wrote:
>> Couldn't you use CSS selectors when targeting XHTML (or XML even)?
>
>>   puts doc.at('.one.two').content
>
> I'm going to. As soon as I get off my lazy butt, I will make nokogiri 
> into a pluggable back-end to the DSL. Then the CSS selection notation is 
> free.
>
> But I can't make the DSL itself into a CSS hybrid because that would  
> disadvantage the other pluggable XML parsers. So if you want pure XML  
> compliance, use REXML, if you want some XHTML awareness use LibXML, and 
> if you want CSS notation use Nokogiri. (After I'm done!)

The CSS to XPath conversion can stand alone as a pure ruby library.
Feel free to take it from my source if you like.  Then you can give CSS
notation to anything that supports XPath. :-)

-- 
Aaron Patterson
http://tenderlovemaking.com/