David Carlisle wrote:
> when something works in saxon and not in another processor you always
> have the possibility that you've hit a bug somewhere. If your
> description is accurate it sounds like something strange is happening
> with the key.

As you may be able to tell, I haven't been doing all that much XSLT
recently.  I'm much more likely to doubt myself than the tools when
I'm inexperienced or rusty with a technology.  But there is a clear-
cut difference between when I run this stylesheet through Saxon and
when I run it through my default processor.  Maybe it's not me after
all!  :-)

Is Saxon generally considered the gold standard?  I don't know what
version of Xalan is being used in my default setup (Ant 1.7 on Java 6)
but it looks as though it is Xalan, since this:

    javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory.newInstance().getClass()

returns this:

 
com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerFactoryImpl


In any case, thank you very much for your help,

  -- Scott