Let me know if you see any problems with the following way of including xpath expressions in .sem files. The present second column can contain a specification for an element,attribte,value triplet or element,attribut, etc. This works well for many documents and will not be changed. Xpath expressions will also be in the second column. ,however, they may contain spaces and they must be distinguished from the present contents of that column. I am thinking of enclosing them in angle brackets, since these cannot otherwise appear in this context. Xpath expressions will be evaluated during the examine_document phrase. If they produce a node set the first and third columns will be assigned to each node in the set. John -- John J. boyer; President, Chief Software Developer Abilitiessoft, Inc. http://www.abilitiessoft.com Madison, Wisconsin USA Developing software for people with disabilities For a description of the software and to download it go to http://www.jjb-software.com