RE: iterate through nodes and determine output by node

> IIRC, XSLT 1.1 included a node-set() function, so you still 
> had to call a function explicitly, it's just that it wasn't 
> an extension function.

No, I don't think that's correct. The working draft is at

http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt11/

Section 11.2 says:

If the variable-binding element does not have a select attribute and has
non-empty content (i.e. the variable-binding element has one or more child
nodes), then the content of the variable-binding element specifies the
value. The content of the variable-binding element is a template; a new
document is constructed with a root node having as its children the sequence
of nodes that results from instantiating this template; namespace fixup is
performed on this document (see 3.5 Namespace Fixup); the value of the
variable is a node-set that contains just the root node of this newly
constructed document.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/