> I'm trying to make a generic template which will, in effect, 
> simply insert stuff before and after the content.  In one case, I 
> want to do it to apply font styling parameters etc. where needed:

This is hard to do in XSLT 1.0, but quite a few people have asked for
it, so maybe evaluating the name of the template to call will come in a
future version of the language.

For now, one approach is that of Mike Kay---you can check the archive
for details, but the meat of it is this:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:template name="xyz" match="xsl:template[@name='xyz']">
  <xsl:message>Hello xyz.</xsl:message>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:variable name="tname" select="'xyz'"/>
  <xsl:apply-templates
     select="document('')/*/xsl:template[@name=$tname]"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The other approach is to rethink your problems and solutions.  For
example, much of what you seem to want to do could probably also be
achieved by use of xsl:attribute-set, or increased use of CSS in
combination with 'class' attributes on your HTML output.

 Steve


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list