Transitive closure for XPath

[Christian Nentwich <c.nentwich@cs.ucl.ac.uk>]

Dear all,

something I really lose sleep over is the lack of a transitive closure
function in XPath. I use XPath standalone, outside XSLT and I need such
an operator (to compute the set of all parent classes of a class in XMI,
for example).

Would you please comment on a little proposal I have written - includes
an implementation of the operator for Xalan as a freebie:

http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/c.nentwich/closure/

Just imagine what this operator could do for *your* family tree XSLT
stylesheet. Am I the only one who finds this (extremely) useful ? Please
comment.

Also, is anyone from the XPath WG reading this ?

Thanks,
Christian

-- 
Christian Nentwich 
Dept. of Computer Science, University College London
+44 (0)20 7679 7190 - http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/c.nentwich