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It's pretty much the exact same thing - let's you specify a file to access with a string (pathname) such as "/foo/bar/cat" rather than having to go step by step first open/reading directory "foo", then open/reading directory "bar", then finally accessing file "cat".

With XPath and JSONPath you're just dealing with DOM nodes and children rather than directories and children.

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Except that XPath and JSONPath are overpowered. I'd welcome a simple standard path syntax for JSON, for instance, I'd want to use for reporting schema errors in JSON document ($.users[10].name must be a string). I can use JSONPath, sure, but even this subset is annoying to parse - compared to a filepath which you can parse with `path.split('/')`.

Agreed - for a lot of use cases all you need is a pathname-like way to refer to elements in the DOM, not a search/filtering mechanism.