Dear Michael,

> If you're familiar with DOM, then "/" equates to the Document 
> node, and "/*"
> to the document element (TipDatabase in your case). In 
> XSLT/XPath 1.0 the document node is called the "root node", 
> and the term "document element" is not used (I generally 
> refer to it as the "outermost element" to avoid
> confusion: it is not the root of the tree, because it has a parent).
> 
> The reason a separate document or root node is needed is that 
> it can contain comments and processing instructions among its 
> children, as well as the outermost element.

thanks for the very good explanation. I think I have to go trough the specs
of xpath when I want to do something usefull.

Regards,

David Preuss