> I was ready to build a temporary tree but was wondering if I there was a
> cleaner solution.

looking at your example code it looks like you are trying to build a
sort key that is just the concatenation of the name attributes
from ancestor class elements.

Isn't sorting on such a concatenation would seem the same as 
sorting at each level of the tree separately.
then you could use a sort key of @name.

so instead of


<xsl:for-each select=".//class">

do 

<xsl:apply templates select="class">
  <xsl:sort select="@name"/>
</xsl:apply-templates>

together with something like

<xsl:template match="class">
   do whatever you want to do for this class, then do its children
  <xsl:apply templates select="class">
    <xsl:sort select="@name"/>
  </xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:template>

David

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