Re: Q on incremental processing and count()

However, from the symptoms that you describe (I'm guessing here - I
don't know how Xalan works internally), as soon as you do include a
count() function, Xalan thinks that the stylesheet involves using
information that is not yet accessible to it, and so reverts to the
more common processing model where it constructs the whole source tree
prior to transformation.

<xsl:template match="table">
 <xsl:value-of select="count(thead/th-c)"/>
</xsl:template>

From a processing point of view the second xpath that Michael proposed (count(thead[1]/th-c)) should do the right job, as the processor does not have to wait until the end of the table element, but just until the end of the first thead element (which should be the only one).

Regards,
 Tobias