---
title: child
slug: >-
  Web/XSLT/Transforming_XML_with_XSLT/The_Netscape_XSLT_XPath_Reference/Axes/child
---
The child axis indicates the children of the context node. If an XPath expression does not specify an axis, the child axis is understood by default. Since only the root node or element nodes have children, any other use will select nothing.
