Re: testing attributes

<xsl:when test="count(//course) &gt; 0">

Tha's a very expensive test it causes the whole document to be searched
to arbitray depth to count all the course elements and then you throw it
all away as you don't really need them. If you are lucky your system (I
think saxon does this) will spot this idiom and change it to
<xsl:when test="//course">
and stop the search when it finds the first course.
I'd use a variable here something like

<xsl:variable name="c" select="//course"/>
If you can replace //course by something else eg /courses/course it might
be a lot more efficient (// is essentially a costly operation, although
the exact details are complicated due to the fact that because it is
easy to spot and very expensive to do, XSLT engines are quite likely to
have optimised code for this case so rewrite it to something more
efficient)

<xsl:variable name="c" select="//course"/>

<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="$c">
<h2>Courses</h2>
<xsl:apply-templates select="$c"/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<h2>You are not currently participating in any any courses</h2>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>




<xsl:template match="courses">
<xsl:apply-templates select="course"/>
</xsl:template>
This template is unused as you never apply templates to courses elements

<xsl:template match="course">
<li>
<a href="{$host}{url}amp;useCas=1" target="_blank"><xsl:value-of
                    ^^ you want &amp; here
select="title"/></a>
Here I'd have do something like
<xsl:apply-templates select="@role"/>
</li>
</xsl:template>


<xsl:template match="@role[.='mathematics']">fun fun fun</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="@role[.='latin']">hmmm</xsl:template>
....


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