dunno what i wrote in the other post but i may have partially been talkin out my.....
it seems that for client side processing passing params is not possible or not obvious, most of my code is server side.
on the server side, the way to pass params to the stylesheet depends very much on what is controlling the xsl, eg. java, perl, asp. usually tho, the function to call the stylesheet will allow you to pass the parameters to it. the xsl code i have posted in the part is what picks up these parameters.
at the top of the xsl you declare the params. this needs to be done as a top level element, ie. right after the opening <xsl:stylesheet> or <xsl:transform> tag.
<xsl

aram name="color"/>
so if you passed a parameter named color from your script it would pick this up and store it in $color - think of it like a global variable.
then if you wanted to print this value later you reference it like...
<xsl:value-of select="$color"/>
to finish off with, if you wanted a default value for the param, when a value isn't given you could do something like...
<xsl

aram name="color">red</xsl

aram>
so if you passed color as being blue, this would overide the value of red.
hope this clears some things up.