Re: [xsl] position last and attributes

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 20/09/2012 08:51, Ihe Onwuka wrote:
> hey could be applied to @* which is
> > > intrinsically unordered.


It is rather misleading to say that @* is intrinsically unordered.
In XPath 1, like all XPath operations it returns a node set and sets are 
unordered.

However Xpath2 it returns an ordered sequence of nodes in document 
order. This order is stable it returns the same order each time you 
query that node. It affects not just position() and last() but all xpath 
features such as << and >>.

It is not that @* is unordered it is just that that the order can not be 
determined by looking at the order of attributes in the markup, but the 
processor has to build an ordered sequence of attribute nodes in its XDM 
model so by the time the XSLT engine is evaluating @* it is just as 
ordered as a sequence of element nodes from *.


David

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