RE: Variable references in path expressions

> can't understand why the WG has allowed the last step to produce
>atomic values, a new functionality which is in my opinion useless,

Older restriction for the filter expression to return only nodes, not
items is hardly much better, as those nodes may have nothing to do with
a "path" as well. 
I guess that is for those cases when a FLOWR is not available, as in an
Xpath 2.0 implementation...

Daniel;