GSoC 2013 proposal: Implement XPath from scratch

[John Chadwick]

Hello,

I am a student of computer science interested in entering Wine 
development via GSoC 2013.

Upon looking at the various suggested proposals, the project of 
reimplementing XPath without libxml2 looked particularly interesting. I 
am familiar with the C language, W3C DOM and XPath, and I believe this 
is something I could do.

I have a few questions I'd be interested in seeing answered:
* One of the 'important things to keep in mind' is that "changes should 
be incremental, with a fallback to libxml2 until new processor is fully 
functional." Does this mean at compile time, or at runtime, when the 
evaluator recognizes unimplemented features in an expression, or 
something else entirely?
* Is only MSXML 3.0 supported? It appears to be the only version 
implemented in the Wine source tree.
* What should I aim at doing first? Because what I'd be working on is a 
library, I would probably need some application to test features with 
(test cases aside.) Should I be using an existing program, or writing a 
new one?

Thanks,
John Chadwick