> But of course, my nested topic
> elements don't appear in the output.

well instead of
select="body" you want to select everything that isn't title, so that
would be

select="*[not(self::title)]"
or if using xslt2
select="* except title"

The question then is what you want to do with nested topics. If they
need the smame re-arranging process then you want your main template to
match match="topic" so that they all get transformed. If nested topics
just want copying then your main template wants match="/topic" so that
it only matches the top level element.


David