distance between elements and hierarchical order

[Sergio Andreozzi]

Dear all,

in order to solve a problem I'm dealing with, I need be able to perform 
the following measurements at the XQuery level:

1. measure the hierarchical order of an element (the level at which the 
element appears in a tree representing the document)

2. measure the distance between two elements (the number of steps 
required to navigate from one element to the other)

do you have any experience or suggestions on how to solve this? At the 
moment, I'm not particularly concerned about efficiency.


Thanks, Sergio