Inquiry: Reordering XML elements through XSL

[Aaron Fischer]

Hello everyone.  I have a comptuational problem which I am not sure XSL can
solve.

My XML documents consist of two basic tag blocks, <A></A> and <B></B>.
They can either be interwoven, i.e. <A></A><B></B><A></A><B></B>, or
separated into sections, i.e. <A></A><A></A><B></B><B></B>.

As XSL is creating the result tree from the XML source tree, I want it to
resequence the order of sibbling elements for a given parent node.  For
example, given an XML document with the ABABAB tag order, I may want to
retranslate it into the AAABBB order.  

I know I can apply a cludge to solve the above problem.  Namely, use
element omission and make two XSL sweeps of the same document.  Run one XSL
script that will output only <A> tags, another script that will output <B>
tags, then concatenate the two output files.

However, this still leaves the reverse problem of translating from a tag
order of AAABBB to ABABAB.  I'm not sure how this problem could be solved
without the use of some direct reordering functionality.

The textbook I am reading mentions, "the reordering of elements is expected
to appear in future version of XSL".  Has this functionality arrived yet?

Any help you can provide is appreciated.

Aaron Fischer

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