["Ray Miller" <millerr@centechgroup.com>]

>> I'm not completely sure I understand. Could you post a short test
document that demonstrates the problem? <<

The Xpointer positioning issue is not a limitation imposed by Docbook-rng
but tools that only support dtd-based ids. An example of this is Xerces for
parsing XML documents and for providing XInclude / XPointer support. "...
XPointer support in Xerces is limited, IDs are supported only when they are
defined in DTDs ..." ( per George at oXygen ).

Xerces appears to successfully resolve Docbook-rng Xpointers by utilizing a
position syntax of something like xpointer="element(/1/2/3)" to reference a
nested element but not dereferencing the same nested element utilizing an id
with syntax such as xpointer="element(foo)", which is (my) preferred method
for Docbook-dtd-4X

Perhaps relative and absolute was not appropriate descriptive terminology.

Ray