You need to retrieve a title (or subtitle), but your current node is not a title.

The DocBook XSL stylesheets offer the title.markup mode for this purpose. Usually, insert the following code into the appropriate place:

<xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="title.markup"/>

The xsl:apply-templates recursively finds the correct title node, regardless where you are. It also looks into an info element, if necessary.

DocBook contains three elements which are used for title markup:

All of the above title elements contain a special mode to get the content of this node:

To further elaborate why you should use one of the previous modes, let's assume you have this chapter title:

<chapter>
   <title>Programming in Python</title>
   <!-- further substructure pruned -->
</chapter>

Let's further assume, you have a template where you need the title from the above chapter. One simple, yet unfavorable, solution could be coded like this:

<xsl:template name="...">
   <xsl:value-of select="ancestor::d:title"/>
</xsl:template>

This has several disadvantages:

Replacing xsl:value-of with xsl:apply-templates as shown in the solution section, ensures correct processing of child elements inside title.

The same is true for subtitle and titleabbrev. Using the subtitle.markup or titleabbrev.markup mode ensures that you always get the correct content.

To see what combination results in what string, find an overview in Table 2.2, “Different Combinations and Their Results on *.markup Modes”.

<title>Programming in Python</title>

<title>Programming in Python</title>
<subtitle>With an IDE</subtitle>

<title>Programming in Python</title>
<titleabbrev>Python</titleabbrev>

<title>Programming in Python</title>
<subtitle>With an IDE</subtitle>
<titleabbrev>Python</titleabbrev>