|
|
|
| child | the children of the context node | |
| descendant | all descendants (children, childrens children, ...) | |
| parent | the parent (empty is at the root) | |
| ancestor | all ancestors from the root to the parent | |
| following-sibling | siblings to the right | |
| preceding-sibling | siblings to the left | |
| following | all following nodes in the document | |
| preceding | all preceding nodes in the document | |
| attribute | the attributes of the context node | |
| namespace | namespace declarations in the context node | |
| self | the context node itself | |
| descendant-or-self | the union of descendant and self | |
| ancestor-or-self | the union of ancestor and self |
Note that attributes and namespace declarations are considered a special kind of nodes.
Some of these axes assume a document ordering of the tree nodes. The ordering essentially corresponds to a left-to-right preorder traversal of the document tree.
The resulting sets are ordered intuitively, either forward (in document order)
or reverse (reverse document order).
For instance, following is a forward axis, and
ancestor is a reverse axis.