Re: XPath2 preceding / following axis and attributes

I think the specs is clear (although it may not be too readable):

On 1/10/06, Soren Kuula <dongfang@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> the |following| axis contains all nodes that are descendants of the root
> of the tree in which the context node is found, are not descendants of
> the context node, and occur after the context node in document order
> <http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath20/#dt-document-order>
>
> So goes the spec...
>
> So what's on the following axis of a context node, which is an
> attribute? In particular, what can be said about the attributes of the
> element that is the parent of the context (attribute) node?

Quoting the XPath 2.0 spec:

    "the descendant axis is defined as the transitive closure of the
child axis",
and
    "Attribute, namespace, and document nodes can never appear as children"

Therefore, attributes can never appear as following::<node-test>.

In fact, it is easy to see that the following two XPath expressions
are equivalent:

      someElement/@someAttribute/following::someNodeTest

and

     someElement/following::someNodeTest


--
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
---------------------------------------
To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the
biggest mistake of all.