I think this may raise some real questions about XSLT. There's still much I like about the power of XSLT, but I hate the syntax and the walls you keep running into. I'm not going to convert my whole site over to Ruby tomorrow - most of the XSLT works fine - but I can certainly see my way to doing that at some point in the future. But the bigger question is whether you're better off with scripting language for this kind of task than XSLT.