> that was where I was going, but I'm surprised that a function was provided 
> to track down IDs but not one to pull apart IDREFS, or build that tokenize 
> functionality into the id() function itself.

It does. The attribute doesn't need to be declared IDREF: any space
separated string is split up automatically:

Xpath 1 says


The id function selects elements by their unique ID (see [5.2.1 Unique
IDs]). When the argument to id is of type node-set, then the result is
the union of the result of applying id to the string-value of each of
the nodes in the argument node-set. When the argument to id is of any
other type, the argument is converted to a string as if by a call to the
string function; the string is split into a whitespace-separated list of
tokens (whitespace is any sequence of characters matching the production
S); the result is a node-set containing the elements in the same
document as the context node that have a unique ID equal to any of the
tokens in the list.

David

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