XInclude, chapter headers & changing font size in <appendix>

[Alex L <alexl@users.sourceforge.net>]

(Apologies if you get multiple copies of this message, I had to
resubscribe to the list and resend the message).

Hi folks,

Long time, no post.  I have three separate questions for the list (I
checked all various FAQs, mailing list archives etc, and couldn't find
much on these issues):

1. Is it possible to XInclude a fragment (using xpointer) from your
   current document, or is that considered illegal in XInclude syntax,
   I couldn't easily tell from the spec, e.g. if my document is
   called bar.xml:

  <para id="foo">Blah blah</para>
  <xi:include href="bar.xml#xpointer(//para[id='foo'])"/>
  <para>Rhubarb, rhubarb</para>

   I guessing it's invalid (xsltproc says "recursion detected"), but I
   just want to make sure it's not something in the way I'm trying to
   do this.  Any other workarounds welcome.  I'm trying to avoid
   having to create an entirely separate document with the
   common/repeated text, it would be nice to simply reuse paras from a
   previous part of the document.
  
2. I can see how to customize the XSL-FO stylesheets so that I get
   running chapter headers with numbers as I do for titlepages. e.g. I
   have a document like:

 <chapter>
   <title>FooBar is frobnicatious</title><titleabbrev>FooBar</titleabbrev>

   and I can get to the running header to appear as either

  "Chapter 1: FooBar is frobnicatious", 
  "FooBar", but not
  "Chapter 1: FooBar"

   I did this using Bob's excellent book (which I'm ordering real
   soon), here: http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/PrintHeaders.html
   and used object.titlemarkup to switch from the first to the second
   style, but can't get the third.  It seems that Chapter %n +
   titleabbrev is mutually exclusive.  How would one go about getting
   the "Chapter %n" + <titleabbrev> rather than the "Chapter 1 %n"
   <title> full title case?  Is this simply a feature that would need
   to be added?

3. In the XSL-FO DocBook stylesheets, I want to display all the body
   text of a particular component-level element, for example
   <appendix> and other backmatter, in a smaller font from the main
   body font (say 7pt).  I thought I could use pagemasters to do this
   and following Bob's instructions at::
   http://sagehill.net/docbookxsl/PageDesign.html

   I attempted to customize the "back" matter pagemasters
   fo:region-body elements something like this:

  <fo:simple-page-master master-name="my-back-odd"
     [...]
      <fo:region-body margin-bottom="{$body.margin.bottom}"
                      margin-top="{$body.margin.top}"
                      font-size="7pt"
                      column-count="{$column.count.back}">
      </fo:region-body>
     [...]
  </fo:simple-page-master>

   I verified that all this gets passed through to the FO output fine
   following Bob's instructions, unfortunately it has no effect
   whatsoever in the PassiveTeX backend.  I'm guessing that this is
   just simply not how the semantics of FO are supposed to work and
   that you would need to customize the <fo:block> or somesuch. But I
   thought that it might just be a backend issue with PassiveTeX.

Thanks for any help!
Alex