Some kinds of XML processing require addressing into internal structures of XML documents. W3C provides a Recomendation for such a language - XPointer - which is actively used by other XML-related technologies, such as XSLT and XLink.

SXPointer is an SXPath-based impementation of XPointer's subset. It doesn't allow XPointer's points and ranges, which makes it possible to garantee that it always yields a well-formed XML/SXML.