sorting to a variable

while trying to help with xsl in another forum i've hit on something which
puzzles me slightly...

the original question was along the lines of needing to output an html table
of say 20 elements and have the table wrap at every 5 elements.

easy enough i thought, and i pointed to the solution at
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/N7450.html#d205e15 - but the elements have to be sorted.
since referencing siblings works in document order (is there a situation
where this *would* be a good thing?) this method can't work.

i then saw http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/N6461.html#d195e592 but i have
never had any success in building my own trees on the fly for processing and
thought that it just wasn't possible. indeed, trying to do this made libxslt
barf and i believe that this is what happened in IE too.

have i just been unlucky with bugs in the software i've used or am i just
missing something subtle?

many thanks.

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