Expressing 2- and 3-D coordinates

[Ed Shaya]

Brian points out to me that Xalan XSLT has some trouble with lists.   
Specifically, it is not clear how to split it  into components and 
address items in it. 

The following page:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/05/07/tr.html
shows how to use the Xpath2 functions tokenize, to split a list, and 
index-of, which returns where in a list a specific value is found.  It 
mentions that Saxon implements these. Saxon also has item-at to select 
an item in a list,

Here is the XPATH2 specification of  tokenize and index-of
http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery-operators/#func-tokenize
http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery-operators/#func-index-of

Now, the real trouble seems to be that Xalan has not yet moved up to 
Xpath2.  However, there is an extension
library.  And to get the tokenizer one needs to add the namespace

xmlns:str="http://exslt.org/strings"

Here is tokenize described in Xalan:
http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/extensionslib.html#tokenize

Yet, there is another small issue and that is that the tokenizer works 
with strings, so one may needs to cast the item as a string first. An 
extra line, but to compensate for this tokenize allows arbitrary 
delimiters.  Therefore a list of strings with spaces in items can be 
declared simply as a string and then split by semi-colons or whatever.

Ed