> Am I missing out on something at the conceptual level 

No just the bit of the spec where it says that the mode attribute has to
be a literal QName. Modes like template names (and like function names
in many other programming languages) are compile time constants that can
not be evaluated at run time.


don't do

<xsl:template match="lll" mode="zzz">

do

<xsl:template match="lll[/content/layout='zzz']">

David


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