> Isn't it a bit confusing to say that it returns it in reverse document
> order? My understanding is that ancestor:: is ordered most immediate
> first i.e direct parent, then parent of parent and so on, all
> the way up to the root.

An axis identifies an (ordered) list of nodes. The predicate associated with
the axis is applied to the ordered list. The result of an XPath expression,
however, is always a node-set, not a list. The node-set is unordered, but
the nodes have an ordering, called document order. Many operations on
node-sets process the nodes in document order. Is that clear now?

Mike Kay


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