First, although Internet Explorer supports the XPath web standard, it cannot be directly accessed for web pages. Dimitri Glazkov has written a javascript library that provides the same functionality for Internet Explorer as last week's post showed for Firefox. However the library has performance issues, and a better prototype may come from Danny Goodman's Javascript & DHTML Cookbook.

Second, Alf Eaton points out that my original code for identifying microformats allows for collisions between different microformats if the identifier of one microformat is contained within another. He suggests a solution using regular expressions. Here's the solution I gave in my last post, with his solution:

var allDivs, thisDiv;
var mf = 'xfolkentry';

var micropath = “//*[contains(@class,'” + mf + “')]”;
var micromatch = new RegExp('\\b' + mf + '\\b');

allDivs = document.evaluate(
    micropath,
    document,
    null,
    XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,
    null);
		
for (var i = 0; i < allDivs.snapshotLength; i++) {
    thisDiv = allDivs.snapshotItem(i);
    // do something here.  For example, change the background color to red.
    if (iNode.className.match(micromatch)) // apply the regex test
    thisDiv.style.backgroundColor = 'red';
}

My sense is that we are heading to the point where we have enough material to write a full tutorial on microformat identification in web browsers. In my next post, I'll discuss how all of this fits into a potential microformats business model.