Xinclusions without surrounding tags

["Dick Hamilton" <rlhamilton@frii.com>]

I've been playing around with Xinclude and some of the examples
that Bob has in his DocBook XSL guide.  Mostly it is working well,
but there is one thing I've been trying to do that I can't get
to work.

How can I create an xpointer reference that will return the
textual contents of an element without the surrounding element
markup?

E.g., Suppose I have the following in a source file:

<article> ...
<section><title>My Funny Valentine</title></section>
....
</article>

and what I'd like to do is grab just the text "My Funny
Valentine" and drop it into another context.  For example,
I might want my result to be:

<varlistentry><term>My Funny Valentine</term> etc.....

If I use xpointer="xpointer(/article/section/title)"
in my xi:include call, I'll get the title element
along with the content.

If I use xpointer="xpointer(/article/section/title/*)"
xmllint fails.

After poking around W3C and other sources I can't find
a way to do this, nor does it look like the standard
handles this situation.  Is that the case, or is there
a way to do this that I've missed?

Thanks,
Dick Hamilton
rlhamilton@frii.com