XSLT is defined as creating a new document; it really isn't architected to be used for updating an existing tree. I believe XQuery has proposed introducing an update facility; I don't know whether that might also make its way into XSLT 2.0.
If you really want to patch an existing model in place... well, you could try writing extensions for the purpose, but there are a number of reasons why that's hazardous; our stylesheet logic assumes the source document is stable and correct operation is emphatically not guaranteed if you patch it in mid-transformation. It might be better to use our XPath API to find the change point and hand-code the actual alteration. ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman, IBM Next-Generation Web Technologies: XML, XSL and more. "The world changed profoundly and unpredictably the day Tim Berners Lee got bitten by a radioactive spider." -- Rafe Culpin, in r.m.filk
