Found an Interesting observation on C.M.Spielberg McQueen’s Blog – XPath 1.0 describes, amongst other axes, ones that allow access to immediate parent and immediate child nodes, as well as access to ancestor and descendant node-sets, but does not provide for immediate siblings – The only way to access these are via predicates – preceding-sibling::*[1] or following-sibling::*[1], and not explicit next-sibling and a previous-sibling axes.