> It seems somebody would have run across this same problem by 
> now, but I can't seem to find a solution to it anywhere.
> 
> Essentially: how do I get the XSLT to "see" the data type of a node?

I think you have to wait for XSLT 2.0. Making XSLT 2.0 schema-aware is
one of the big changes in the new version.
> 
> What I'm doing: given a bunch of nodes from an XML doc I'm 
> matching on (*), I want to perform a specific action to them 
> based upon the data type contained within the XML node.
> 

It's pretty ambitious to attempt this with XSLT 1.0, but the way I would
suggest is: if you're using Xerces, say, to do the validation, then
write a back-end to the parser that extracts the type information from
the PSVI produced by Xerces and converts it into an attribute (you could
use @xsi:type perhaps), which would then be accessible to the XSLT
processor as a standard attribute of each element.

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 


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