If you would refers it, and make it, say: ` node ( ) | @* ' the nodes
would first be copied, resulting in the attributes ending up illegally:
you may not create an attribute node after you create an element node in
the result tree. However, I'm not sure if this is really enforced by the
specs.

This is not true.

The order in which an <xsl:apply-templates> instruction is applied on
the nodes selected by the expression as specified in its select
attribute is not defined and may be in any order.

What is important, is that the results of these applications are
combined/ordered based on the document order of the processed nodes.