RE: possible to mimic while-like behavior?

The only hack for general iteration, that is for(i = 0; i< 9; i++) that I know of is to call a named template that recurses.  However for your example, you could be able to create a node set that is
all elements before blah, something like:

<xsl:for-each select="blah/preceding-sibling::*">

</xsl:for-each>



 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list