Thanks for your suggestions.  I am not sure the CMS vendor supports XSL 2.0. 
After looking more at the system I think I'll implement an XSL extension to
retrieve sysdate instead of passing it everywhere I need it.  I've been
digging deeper and found that the dates are stored as yyyyMMddTHHmmss, which I
don't think is xs:datetime format but should be pretty easy to parse/sort, or
convert to another format for parsing/sorting.  

Therefore, since a single XML document contains both the IA and the content, I
think I can do something like (half code, half psuedo-code):

<xsl:variable name="sysdate" select="me:function" />

Is it possible to write a single XPath query that merges the equivalent of the
two XPath queries below (excuse my attempt at syntax) such that an
xsl:for-each with that as select will first process the elements matching the
first condition, then those matching the second condition?  

//item[@highlight_date &lt; $sysdate]

//item

Also, to ensure I don't get the same record twice, do I just reverse the first
condition in the second condition?  Something like:

//item[@highlight_date &lt; $sysdate]

//item[@highlight_date &gt;= $sysdate]

I think that for performance I wouldn't want this combined query to return
more than 5 records.  It seems like this would have to do with position(), but
that can only apply before the sort, and I want the 5 records after sort.  Any
suggestions?  maybe a recursive function?  anyway, I have to consider
alternatives for performance.

Then within the xsl:for-each I need to sort such that those records matched by
the highlight_date query appear first - any suggestions there?

Now you can can all see how lost I am.

Thanks again,

   -John

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 21:08:26 -0300, Jan Limpens wrote
> john, 
> 
> xslt version 1 does not support type checking, everything is more or
> less just text. so doing date parsing is kind of tedious, still
> possible (depending on how complex the check is). you probably could
> pass the current date as a parameter to the xsltransformer and let 
> the stylesheet do the checking using regular expression and alike. 
> or, if the date is stored in the xs:datetime format, an alphabetic 
> sort will do, then you will need to select only the first 5 
> elements. (if it4s based on novelty)
> 
> maybe you will think about letting .net decide weather a xml file
> qualifies for the main page or not and pass the result (the n 
> selected filenames) as a parameter to the xslt file, which then just 
> 'dumbly' transforms.
> 
> another possibility is to use a xslt 2.0 transformer (saxon) but the
> .net implementation is still very at its beginning and IMHO the .net
> transformer is currently more user friendly and stable.
> 
> just my 55
> 
> --
> jan
> 
> On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 19:15:18 -0400, xsl-list <xsl-list@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I am new to the list and XSL in general, so I apologize if this is the wrong
> > forum for this question.  I am also simplifying my problem as much as
> > possible.  I am also still at a pretty high level, looking more into the
> > concepts than the code.  While I would appreciate code examples, simple
> > suggestions of what tokens I should research or URLs with further information
> > would also be appreciated.  I am working with a CMS that stores both the
> > information architecture (like a directory structure) and content (like XML
> > files inside the directories) as XML which is transformed using XSL to HTML
> > for distribution to browsers.  If what I'm trying to do becomes too
> > complicated for XML I can use pure .NET code, but I'm wondering what XSL
> > solutions might be possible.
> > 
> > Each news record has a "release date" value.  I am not sure of the format but
> > hopefully my code could handle multiple formats, or if there is a standard for
> > date formatting in XML maybe the CMS uses that.  On a main page I need to list
> > the latest 5 article titles based on this "release date", with links to the
> > article content.  That would seem like a simple sort with some kind of break
> > condition after 5 loops (though I'm not even sure how to do that), but the
> > complication is that each record also has a "highlight until" date; if the
> > current system date is before the "highlight until" date, those highlighted
> > records need to appear at the top of the list, which should still be
> > constrained to 5 articles.
> > 
> > It seems that XSL doesn't inherently know what date it is, so either my CMS
> > vendor should already be passing that or I need to figure out how to pass this
> > as a parameter to my XSL.  I'm also not finding many web references to this
> > specific kind of date logic.  Based on these I'm wondering if a .NET component
> > is the right way to go, but since the data is already in XML I think I would
> > prefer XSL if possible/not too complicated.
> > 
> > Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> >    -John