Hi,

> I agree with you that consistency would be nice and a patch in that
> direction would be welcome!

Please find attached a patch.

While working on this patch, I found that two of the code snippets don't
work. They work neither with square brackets nor with round
brackets. The two snippets are

* The first snippet in the "Matching the Unmatched Attributes" subsection

@lisp
(sxml-match '(a (@@ (z 1) (y 2) (x 3)) 4 5 6)
  ((a (@@ (y ,www) . ,qqq) ,t ,u ,v)
   (list www qqq t u v)))
@end lisp

* The snippet in the "Default Values in Attribute Patterns" subsection

@lisp
(sxml-match '(e 3 4 5)
  ((e (@@ (z (,d 1))) ,a ,b ,c) (list d a b c)))
@end lisp

These snippets fail to evaluate. Could you check?

Thanks!