I'm trying to parse HTML file with libxml2. Usually this works fine, but not in this case: <p> <b>Titles</b> (Some Text) <table> <tr> <td valign="top"> …Something1... </td> <td align="right" valign="top"> …Something2... </td> </tr> </table> </p> I do this query to get the first <td> //p[b='Titles']/table/tr/td[0] but nothing is returned because libxml think that <table> tag is not a child of a tag <p> and following him. And finally the question WHY?