I feel it will on occasion, be necessary to know this.
The use case I arrived at, which failed to convince Mike,
was that if I'm only processing 1 sect2 element, then I should
number things from that node, not from the source document root node
as would normally be the case.
Can you think of a better use case for knowing where your stylesheet
started processing?
The initial node is in fact available, you can make it a global variable by
writing
<xsl:variable name="start" select="."/>
It's the initial template and initial mode that aren't available. Template
names and mode names are not things that a stylesheet normally manipulates
at run-time, and I think if we made them available it would quickly lead to
demands to specify modes and template names dynamically in call-template and
apply-templates (not that such demands would be new).
Michael Kay