David Carlisle wrote:
without any nested xsl:templates?

I can't really guess what a nested template would mean. 

A template within a template



<template>
	<template>
	</template>
</template>


But I considered what you said about having a template within another 
template was not a good thing and twisted my mind around that. So now 
I've got this XSLT (also added the string to the sorting, courtesy of 
David):



<xsl:template match="report">
    <xsl:apply-templates match="contents"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="contents">
	<xsl:apply-templates>
		<xsl:sort select="member[@name='idstring']/string"/>
	</xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="object[@type='standard']">
    <xsl:value-of select="member[@name='idstring']"/>
    <xsl:value-of select="member[@name='id']"/>
    <xsl:value-of select="member[@name='title']"/>
</xsl:template>


This workes just the way I want it, so unless you guys can see something 
wrong with this I can happily get out of the office :)



GTH