XQuery and id()/idref(); Controlling the children of nodes in the result sequence

[Michael Kay]

> So the question is, is it possible to recursively traverse 
> the descendants of the a:data node and select only those 
> element nodes which 
>    refer to the same a:span element?

Well, the answer is yes - though at this point I'm afraid I start wishing
the code was written in XSLT rather than XQuery: XSLT makes recursive
traversal of a tree so much easier. But you can do it: write a recursive
function that you apply to a node, and which calls itself to process the
children of the node.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/