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This is motivated by a suggestion from Andre Cusson on xsl-list, 2008-02-03. It would be a useful generalization of the XSLT processing model to allow apply-templates on atomic values. It is currently restricted to nodes. This would allow a capability similar to typeswitch in XQuery, but with the advantages of dynamic despatch (including the ability to override rules in a customization layer, for example). It would effectively give XSLT polymorphism over atomic types as well as over node types. This would require extension of XSLT patterns to be able to match atomic values by type. A possible syntax might be match="type(AtomicType)". The existence of such patterns would also be useful in the group-starting-with and group-ending-with attributes of xsl:for-each-group, which are currently restricted to use when grouping sequences of nodes.
This bug is to be closed as the function was included in the First WD of XSLT 2.1.