Inside XSLT

Using the XPath Axes

That’s it for the three parts of location steps—the axis, node test, and predi-cate. You should be familiar with these to some extent from the work we’ve done with match patterns, but notice the axis I used in the previous exam-ple—the preceding-sibling axis. So far in this book, you’ve only seen the axes that match XSLT patterns— child and attribute axes—and now it’s time to take a look at the new axes available in full XPath expressions, starting with the ancestor axis.