trying for: a template that calls apply-templates on its children only u

Hi all,

im trying to do something a little unusual, but which is surprisingly 
quite hard.
for a given template, i only want it to keep rendering it's children 
until it's counted a certain number of occurrences of a particlar 
element (in this case br elements), and then stop applying templates 
altogether.
As to why I need this, basically there are some rare cases where our 
system returns xml that's just enormous, so enormous that rendering 
takes way too long. And since the data coming back is to large to be 
useful anyway, i want to just render the first few lines and then stop 
completely.
Maybe this isnt a job for XSLT, but i'm not quite ready to admit that..

I first tried a massively inefficient way:

<xsl:template match="myTroublesomeNode">
  <xsl:for-each select="node()">
      <xsl:if test="count(preceding-sibling::br)&lt;20">
          <xsl:apply-templates select="."/>
      </xsl:if>
  </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

but calling this count(preceding-sibling::br) on every node is a clear 
case of the cure being worse than the disease.

So... since then I've been trying recursion, but I clearly dont know 
what im doing cause the parser complains about infinite recursion in the 
following snippet...
(I have a sense that the way im using my $nextNode param and the 
preceding/following axes is wrong, but i cant improve on it. )
<xsl:template match="myTroublesomeNode">
  <xsl:call-template name="brCounter">
      <xsl:with-param name="nextNode" select="node()[1]"/>
  </xsl:call-template>
</xsl:template>

<!-- danger, i contain infinite recursion somewhere, so take care -->
<xsl:template name="brCounter">
  <xsl:param name="nextNode" />
  <xsl:if test="count($nextNode/preceding-sibling::br)&lt;10">
      <xsl:apply-templates select="$nextNode"/>
      <xsl:call-template name="brCounter">
          <xsl:with-param name="nextNode" 
select="$nextNode/following-sibling::node()[1]" />
      </xsl:call-template>
  </xsl:if>
  <xsl:if test="count($nextNode/preceding-sibling::br)&gt;=10">
      I've had all i can stands.    i cant stands no more.
  </xsl:if>  </xsl:template>

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated... 
n



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