With Martin and Greg's assistance:
rewrote some of Mike's calls which relied on id($id) method to use more conventional xquery.

When I tried to test these in the jnlp client, we eventually realized that the client was incompatible with the version of eXist running the MofL db. Got that going by grabbing the exist from the server and editing the shell script to call on it from my mac.

Eventually got xquery which seems to return sensible data back, but subsequent call to xslt passing in that data fails.

Also, as a matter of interest I was unable to return nodelist of attribute nodes as Mike had done, but instead returned entire article and then extracted id attribute node and its data from that.

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