That would be a better way around but I can't see a way to wrap the page-specific stylesheets in the common one without breaking the common stylesheet in two stylesheets, top and bottom, or am I missing the point.

Something like this:

[specialCase.xsl]

<xsl:stylesheet>

<xsl:import href="generalCase.xsl"/>

<xsl:template match="/" mode="page-specific">
 ... generate page-specific content ...
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

[generalCase.xsl]

<xsl:stylesheet>

<xsl:import href="generalCase.xsl"/>

<xsl:template match="/">
 <boilerplate>
   <xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="page-specific"/>
 </boilerplate>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

The detail can vary, depending on how much common structure there is between
the different XML source documents. As shown above, it works with no common
structure at all: the only thing the general-purpose stylesheet does it to
wrap a standard boilerplate around the page-specific output.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<data>
   <title>List of people</title>
   <people>
       <person id="1">
           <firstname>Harry</firstname>
           <lastname>Love</lastname>
       </person>
       <person id="2">
           <firstname>Tim</firstname>
           <lastname>Burton</lastname>
       </person>
   </people>
</data>

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