> By atomic i meant it's greek meaning of "indivisible".

yes I suspected that (in which case the answer is yes)  but I wasn't
sure if you were refering to the defined term "atomic value" in XPath2
(in which case the answer is no, atomic values as defined by xpath2
consist of integers, strings, dates etc, but explictly not nodes)

> so it can't select something that doesn't
> exist, so what i want is not possible.

correct.

David

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