Re: position()

   <rant>
   Yes, so it should. The decision to make it behave otherwise was
   IMHO entirely bogus, I'm afraid. Especially in view of the fact 
   that SGML processing languages all implement their positional
   function wrt the referenced element type in its location within
   its parent, as one would expect. But it's not something that will
   ever change.


I think the rant is misplaced. position() seems perfectly natural to me.
what you are asking for sounds more like xsl:number. In any language
that has a list concept having access to the length of the list (last())
and position in the list seems quite common. That is what position() does.

You say position() should have been defined to give the sibling element
position. So in

<xsl:for-each select="section/title">
 section <xsl:value-of select="position()"> <xsl:value-of select="."> 
</xsl:for-each>

You think that it would be more natural for every section to be
labeled "1" as every title (in a document you'll just have to imagine)
is the first child of its parent?


   Until someone can produce a function that behaves in a normal
   manner (ie as above), it needs to be remembered (and FAQ'd?)
   that position() means node-position(), not element-position().

That function is count(preceding-sibing::*)+1

   I'm a little surprised that the newlines between TAGC and STAGO
   are not counted as text nodes :-)
   </rant>

As I mentioned before, they are.

   ///Peter

David


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