Re: [xml-dev] XPath brain teaser

[Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>]

>This is easier to understand if you think of it in terms of set construction
>and iterators. The two expressions with abbreviations eliminated are:
>
>/descendant-or-self::node()/para[1]
>/descendant::para[1]

You might ask why // means the first of these, rather than the more
obvious second.  The answer (I think) is precisely so that expressions
like //para[1] will mean what they do; it's more common to want to
treat the first paragraph in each section specially than the first
paragraph in the while document.

-- Richard