On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 20/09/2012 07:13, Ihe Onwuka wrote:
>>
>> It would seem (somewhat paradoxically) that given the definition of
>> position() and last() they could be applied to @* which is
>> intrinsically unordered.
>>
>
> Actually, there is a total ordering relation (document order) over all
> nodes. It's just that for two attributes of the same element (and indeed,
> say, for two elements in different documents) the ordering relation is
> implementation-dependent. So it's not correct to say that they are
> "intrinsically unordered". They are ordered, but not in a predictable way.
>

Then to me, they are not ordered irrespective of what the implementation does.