Re: Ancestors and siblings

Jan Hidders <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.web.query-languages
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Donald Spaeth wrote:

>I've just been reviewing the proofs of an article I wrote last year on the
>use of XML to represent data derived from historical sources, and I realize
>that a passage on the many and wondrous uses of axes has been rendered
>obsolete by XPath 2.0 and XQuery.  Can someone explain why the ancestor,
>preceding-sibling, and following-sibling axes have been dropped?
>  
>
Actually, they have been put back in again, ... sort of. See the full 
axis feature:

    http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/#id-full-axis-feature

If I recall correctly the two most important arguments against them were 
there these axes are hard to type and hard to optimize. Personally I 
find the second argument rather odd and I know that in some cases 
certain optimizations become in fact more difficult if you don't have 
these axes.

-- Jan Hidders

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