If we want to turn this into a game of code golf, then a few characters 
can be shaved:

Thanks to precedence rules, using '|' in place of ',' means you can drop 
a pair of brackets.

To save 2 characters, "empty" can be replaced with "not".  Also,   It is 
also possible to trim the whitespace between '*' and 'except', but that 
is really getting nasty.

Title and Date and not(*except Title[1]|Date[1]|Author)



Oliver Hallam
http://www.xqsharp.com


Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> I was just informed that the predicate [1] is not needed outside the except() function.
>
> So, the super, super XPath is David's solution:
>
>
> ************************************************
>
> Title and Date and empty(* except (Title[1], Date[1], Author))
>
> ************************************************ 
>
>
> Incredible.
>
> /Roger
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