If I pass in an xsl:param called "rowname" (for example, rowname="FOO") can I emit a tag <FOO>...</FOO>?

I know I must be missing something -- every aettempt to use naked < > characters barfs my editor, and any attempt to either wrap them in CDATA or xsl:text or else just use &lt; &gt; results in getting &lt;FOO&gt; foo in my output, which is not what I want.

Thanks!

Take a look at the xsl:element documentation:
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Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

Reading Joe's answer, I now understand your question. I'm afraid it had me completely baffled before, and the reason I was confused was the same as the reason you were confused - by talking about "tags" you had me thinking at the level of raw unparsed XML, whereas actually what you want to emit is an element node in the result tree. It's really important to get this straight. Incidentally, the construct <FOO>...</FOO> uses two tags to represent one element - a start tag and an end tag.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

Sorry Michael (and thanks, Joe!). I've hovered around XSL at my previous job, knowing the basics enough to put together a stylesheet but leaving the tricker bits to our resident pro. I've recently changed jobs and I'm it, so I'm having to learn all these things for myself. My apologies for not fully grokking the terminology yet. (As a programmer I tend to think in terms of the raw character stream, hence 'tag'. I was just trying to blast out the equivalent of angle bracket text angle bracket.).

D