Wow! Talk about responsive. Thank you both very much James and Michael.
Both solutions do exactly what I wanted.

Now I just have to figure out why:

    (ancestor::*/@att)

selects elements in document order whereas

    ancestor::*[@att]

selects them in reverse (which is what I'd expect).

Regards,

Sean

 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list