>i am trying to list the parts of a book in reverse order.

Kill the predicate (ie []) in your for-each and place the following 
as the first line in the body:

<xsl:sort select="position()" data-type="number" order="descending"/>

Regards,

Dan

------
File: ReverseOrder.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="ReverseOrder.xsl"?>

<book>
 <part><title>foo</title></part>
 <part><title>bar</title></part>
 <part><title>huhu</title></part>
</book>

File: ReverseOrder.xsl
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:template match="book">
  <xsl:for-each select="part">
   <xsl:sort select="position()" data-type="number" 
    order="descending"/>
   <xsl:value-of select="title"/><br/>
  </xsl:for-each>
 </xsl:template>  
</xsl:stylesheet>



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