Re: negate predicate

  I want to select the text of all descendants of a node which *don't*
  have an attribute called 'id' (and none of the nodes which are
  descendants of nodes with id attributes).

By that I think you mean you want to select all text nodes that don't
have an ancestor with an id attribute, that would be

//text()[not(ancestor::*/@id)]

Note by the way that [@id = '']/doesn't test if te element has an id
attribute, just if it is empty <foo id=""/> woul dtest true, you want
[not(@id)] to test for the attribute itself rather than its value.

David


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