Hi Mike (cc @ basex-talk), you're right, Firefox seems to have problems rendering the page (Opera and Chrome didn't cause any problem in my ad-hoc test).. Christian _____________________

Hi Christian

...

No problem; for further requests, feel free to try our mailing list search:

  http://basex.org/service/mailinglist-search/

Thanks! By the way, is it just me or is there a problem with the results formatting in Firefox 4? (seems fine in IE8)

...

You can either specify external variable bindings via the "set" command in the Command mode..

  set bindings $firstName=x

..or add a default value to your XQuery expression (this feature is avaiable since XQuery 3.0):

  declare variable $firstName as xs:string external := 'x';   $firstName

Hope this helps,

Excellent both work perfectly! Many thanks.