> I was using xsl:element - but I was trying to achieve the 
> above using item-at and was not sure if I can use that 
> function within the xsl:element name AVT.

The item-at() function disappeared from the XSLT 2.0 spec about three years
ago. item-at($seq, $p) can be written as $seq[$p]. The item-at function did
have one advantage over using a predicate, the second argument could be "."
which saves you assigning a variable. But if you want to achieve that, you
can write subsequence($seq, ., 1).

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/