An article was just posted to The O'Reilly Network which lists some useful tips to remember when using XPath and XPointer. All ten tips are definitely worth committing to memory. I've seen the first tip alone snag so many people it's ridiculous. Everyone always seems to forget our poor friend the text node. ;) Truthfully I think it has a lot more to do with the human brain not processing whitespace as efficiently as the XML specification would like us to.