> but there are situations in which you can not use
> position() because it doesn't give you the exact node (for example
> when you have #text elements randomly beside <node>.

If you only want to iterate over elements, just select elements not text
nodes, then position() will give the position in the sequence of
selected items.

<xsl:for-each seelct="node[position() mod 2 =1]"

does what you want, I think.

David