Problem accessing child nodes of a variable nodeset

I have an XSLT template which is passed a nodeset as a parameter:

        <xsl:param name="pageNode"/>

The nodeset appears to be passed correctly, because I can access a child
attribute:

        <xsl:value-of select="$pageNode/@URL"/>
        (returns "index.html")

However, if I try accessing a child element, which I know contains text
data, then I get a blank result:

        <xsl:value-of select="$pageNode/title"/>
        (returns nothing)

Can anybody guess what I'm doing wrong? I suspect it may have something
to do with namespaces, as I'm having a few problems with these - I've
had to declare prefixes for all of my namespaces, so that the above
select, without variables, would look like:

        <xsl:value-of select="ws:webpage/title"/>

I imagine that, with a variable giving a starting point in the node
tree, the namespace should be picked up automatically, but perhaps this
isn't the case for child elements? If not, how do I set the namespace as
something like the following doesn't work:
        <xsl:value-of select="ws:$pageNode/title"/>

Dan Sumption
dan(_at_)bradonpace(_dot_)com
www.sumption.org 


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