templates for flattening a purely hierarchical XML structure

flatten.xslt

  <!-- templates for flattening a purely hierarchical XML structure 
       into a list of <item> records -->
  
  <xsl:template match="*" mode="flatten">
    <xsl:apply-templates mode="flatten"/>
  </xsl:template>
  
  <xsl:template match="*[not(*)]" mode="flatten">
    <!-- working upwards starting from leaf nodes -->
    <item>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="flatten-ancestor"/>
    </item>
  </xsl:template>
  
  <xsl:template match="*" mode="flatten-ancestor">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
    </xsl:copy>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="ancestor::*[1]" mode="flatten-ancestor"/>
  </xsl:template>

Cool, thanks! It's not what I needed, though... but I have already found what I was looking for.