Sorry for pressing the wrong key and sending prematurely. 
> >
> OK, how am I going to determine my axes after throwing my home made 
> parser at the XPath then?
> There are the cases "",  "@", ".." and explicit for the axes, 
> and there 
> are kind and name tests for the node tests.

The rules for abbreviated steps are spelled out at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath20/#abbrev

> 
> Did you not mean @foo/self::*  as to no-go?

Yes, thanks for the correction.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/