apply-templates and XHTML's <p> tag

This would be none too hard in Perl. But I am stumped
for it in XSLT. When one does...

...XSLT seeks out and does all the <foo> tags
and inflicts the foo template to them. I get that.

But when parsing an XHTML <p> tag, it may
have text mish-mashed in and between <b> and <i>
and <span> tags...in no fixed order.

<xsl:template match="p">
  <xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:template>

...as the <b>, <i> and <span> will go bye-bye with
all their text siphoned out from them, yes? I don't
want that, obviously.

Cool would be to split <p> into a sequence of <foo>
tags with the <b> and <i> as attributes for some,
not on others.

Can someone point me at a tutorial or how-to which
illustrates an XSLT-ish method for dealing sequentially
with a mixed bunch of text and tags?

Gan
--

 <(+)__       Gan Uesli Starling
  ((__/)=-    Kalamazoo, MI, USA
   `||`
    ++        http://starling.us