Child Sequences

Another very common form of XPointer is one that descends exclusively along the child axis, selecting elements by their positions relative to their siblings. For example, xpointer(/child::*[position( ) = 1]/child::*[ position( ) = 2]/child::*[position( ) = 3]) selects the third child element of the second child element of the root element of the document. The element( ) scheme allows you to abbreviate this syntax by providing only the numbers of the child elements separated by forward slashes. This is called a child sequence . For example, the previous XPointer could be rewritten using the element scheme in the much more compact form element(/1/2/3).

For example, the aforementioned Motivation and Summary section of the "Namespaces in XML" recommendation at http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xml-names-19990114/xml-names.xml is given as a div element. It so happens that this div element is the first child element of the second child element of the root element. Therefore, http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xml-names-19990114/xml-names.xml#element(/1/2/1) points to this section.