RE: Restricting the scope of preceding:: and following

... count(ancestor::s[1]|$sentence)=1 

> I've always 
> preferred the variant: generate-id(ancestor::s[1]) = 
> generate-id($sentence). That should give better 
> results..

Jeni Tennison once did some performance tests and found that some processors
gave better results for count(a|b)=1, others for
generate-id(a)=generate-id(b).  IIRC, she found that generate-id() was much
slower on Saxon, but faster on other processors. It may have changed in the
meantime, of course.

In XSLT 2.0 you can say what you mean, and write "a is b".

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/