Thanks Jim. Between your response and Michael Kay's I
managed to make it work. What you suggested was a
pretty elegant solution, I just need to make sure that
TABLE is addressed using ../../TABLE because my
context node is 2 levels down from TABLE. (Kay's
suggestion)

One question: the var turned out to be needed. If I
use ITEM[@id=@col_id]/@name I get the same name, i.e.,
I get (col1, col1) instead of (col1, col2) as if
@col_id gave me the same number every time the
template matches. Why?

J.L.