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THE XML REVOLUTION  -  TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE FUTURE WEB

Axes

child		the children of the context node
descendant		all descendants (children, childrens children, ...)
parent		the parent (empty if at the root)
ancestor		all ancestors from the parent to the root
following-sibling		siblings to the right
preceding-sibling		siblings to the left
following		all following nodes in the document, excluding descendants
preceding		all preceding nodes in the document, excluding ancestors
attribute		the attributes of the context node
namespace		namespace declarations in the context node
self		the context node itself
descendant-or-self		the union of descendant and self
ancestor-or-self		the union of ancestor and self

Note that attributes and namespace declarations are considered a special kind of nodes here.

Some of these axes assume a document ordering of the tree nodes. The ordering is the left-to-right preorder traversal of the document tree - which is the same as the order in the textual representation.

The resulting sets are ordered intuitively, either forward (in document order) or reverse (reverse document order).
For instance, following is a forward axis, and ancestor is a reverse axis.

(Frustratingly, each technology uses a slightly different tree model...)

COPYRIGHT © 2000-2003 ANDERS MØLLER & MICHAEL I. SCHWARTZBACH

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