I wrote

    My  failed xpath expression so far looks like this;
    exsl:node-set($ul)/ul[@id='menu']/li[//li/@id=$id]/text()
  
  looks OK to me,

sorry I didn't look closely enough.  //li/@id=$id searches the whole tree
each time so [//li/@id=$id] is always true if there is such an li
anywhere you only want to search descendents of the current node so
that's

  exsl:node-set($ul)/ul[@id='menu']/li[.//li/@id=$id]/text()
                                       ^
                                       ^


again you may need prefixes if your elements are namespaced.

David

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