backwards tree-traversal algorithm?

hello, having some trouble making this work: within my stylesheet,
i have selected a node somewhere in the midst of the document tree,
several nested elements deep.  what i would like to do is, given
this node N (at arbitrary depth), walk *back* up the document tree
hierarchy, element by element, printing the successive parent elements
(technically, printing each element's "name" @ribute).

so with node N being <c> and the following document:

<root>
  <a>
	  <b>
		  <c/>
		</b>
		<d/>
		<e/>
	</a>
</root>

i want to print: b, a, root.

my pseudocode was along the lines of:

current = node
while current != root
  current = ../
	print current/@name

seems simple.

recursive templates seemed like the way to do this in xsl, but i
can't get this to do anything, apparently because the processor i'm
using (sablotron 0.90) won't let me use XPath on the node set i am
passing with call-template (as a param) because it's "not a node-set".

so i guess i have two questions:

1. what is the best algorithm/approach to walk back up the parent:: tree, printing each element?

2. does sabcmd not have a node-set() function? is this what's stopping me?

(if it helps, the stylesheet will know what depth level the current
node is at, and the unique @name attribute of each parent element.)

 jm3 / john manoogian III / http://jm3.net / jm3@xxxxxxx 

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