Your menuItem element doesn't have an ancestor called pageID so
ancestor-or-self::pageID will select nothing.

I'm not really sure what you want but you seem to need descendants rather
than ancestors.

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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Austin, Darrel [mailto:Darrel.Austin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 26 March 2007 22:59
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  What's wrong with my ancestor syntax?
> 
> I'm trying to use ancestor-or-self.
> 
> Here's a sample of the XML:
> <menuItems>
>  <menuItem>
>       <pageID>938</pageID>
>       <browserTitle>Home Page</browserTitle>
>       <lastUpdate>2006/06/12</lastUpdate>
>       <menuItem>
>          <pageID>998</pageID>
>          <browserTitle>District Administration</browserTitle>
>          <lastUpdate>2006/06/06</lastUpdate>
>       </menuItem>
>  </menuItem>
> <menuItems>
> 
> This is the XML that forms our site menu. I want to create an 
> RSS feed that lists the most recent 10 pages that have been 
> changed under a certain node of the menu.
> 
> So, for this example, I want to pass in the page ID of '938' 
> and return both '938' and any child page underneath it.
> 
> Here's the XSL:
> 
> <xsl:param name="pageID">1</xsl:param>
> 
> <xsl:template match="/">
> 	<xsl:for-each 
> select="*/menuItem[ancestor-or-self::pageID = $pageID]"> 
> 		<xsl:sort select="substring(@lastUpdate,1,4)"
> order="descending" /> <!-- year  -->
> 		<xsl:sort select="substring(@lastUpdate,6,2)"
> order="descending" /> <!-- month -->
> 		<xsl:sort select="substring(@lastUpdate,9,2)"
> order="descending" /> <!-- day   -->
> 		<xsl:call-template name="createItem" />
> 	</xsl:for-each>
> </xsl:template>
> 
> <xsl:template name="createItem">
> 		lastUpdate: <xsl:value-of select="lastUpdate"/>
> 		browserTitle: <xsl:value-of select="browserTitle"/>
> 		pageID: <xsl:value-of select="pageID"/> </xsl:template>
> 
> Originally, I had 'descendant-or-self' by mistake which 
> obviously gave me the exact opposite of what I wanted and 
> returned the specific node and all PARENT pages that matched. 
> So I changed to ancestor-or-self and now it doesn't appear to 
> match anything. I'm not sure why. Is my logic a bit off?
> 
> -Darrel