You picked a particularly vexing example to start with. //foo is interpreted as /descendent-or-self:*/child:foo, so its order is breadth-first. (d-or-s and child both return results in document order, but this combination applies child to each d-or-s in succession).
Similar non-obvious results can occur with other descendant cases, or when one or more of the reverse axes (parent, preceeding, preceeding-sibling) is used. But most individual (non-reverse) primitive XPath operations do return nodes in document order. See the XPath spec for details. Note too that it isn't uncommon for users of XPath, such as XSLT's apply-template operation, to put the nodes back in document order before processing them. ______________________________________ "... Three things see no end: A loop with exit code done wrong, A semaphore untested, And the change that comes along. ..." -- "Threes" Rev 1.1 - Duane Elms / Leslie Fish (http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/threes-rev-11.html)
