TreePath

LDAP has a very powerful path specification language. Unfortunately, it's somewhat more cumbersome than XPath, and familiar to fewer people than other more well-known tree navigation languages such as XPath and glob().

I'm proposing that the next version of LDAP have an option to use TreePath-based paths (as described in TreePath -- a universal tree navigation language) as well as the traditional LDAP ones.

glob(), as I said in the article "TreePath -- a universal tree navigation language", has its good points, but is lacking in power. It's time an upgrade was done.

What advantages would XPath gain from using TreePath? There are a few:

• Simple TreePath would provide a simpler alternative to XPath
• If the TreePath language becomes more widely used, people will be able to learn XPath more easily because it will already be familiar.
• If TreePath becomes more widely used (eg. in filesystem navigation), there will be a much larger pool of people contributing to and optimising it.

I'm not a die-hard XML fan. It has its place, but it's not the best thing ever. But there is one thing about the XML milieu that I really do like.