Lets assume that these pagebreaks can occur at any place within the
article. In the stylesheet above I've tried to sort the articles like
this:

<xsl:sort select=".//@page[1]"/>

In my head this XPath expression reads "in the current article -> go
through all of the descendants -> select all of their attributes ->
pick out the page attributes -> pick the first one".

However, when run; nothing is sorted - as if the xsl:sort wasn't there
at all. I suspect that maybe it searches through the entire document
each time so that all articles are sorted as "page 1"? What am I doing
wrong here...

I think you want
  select="(.//@page)[1]"
although I think
  select=".//@page"
would suffice as well.

	Martin Honnen
	http://msmvps.com/blogs/martin_honnen/