Sorry, but didn't know that this is already in use, I've just read it when the commits for html, bightml, and fo were done. So I thought at the beginnig (knowing that at least TOCs doesn't work completely, and there were some small bugs in the existing files) I have enough time to write everything new to a complete set. Since both, html and bightml don't use css, etc., I left that out to save time and filesizes.
A 2nd reason was the big upgrade to docbook-xsl 1.60.1 (from 1.50?), where it was completely unsure, if all the "not-yet-working-styles" still work like before.
htmlhelp is like fo a special thing, (which btw. meanwhile supported also by docbook-xsl but I didn't check yet how much changes would be needed), which should be handled as such.
For the HTML Help stuff, the rule was: leave all CSS possible, and let skin designers use them if they want. I already have one skin on my hdd, but have not released it, cause I am delaying it till the next content update. There are quite a few CSS classes used in the HTMLHelp CSS files (see the htmlhelp/suippfiles/html dir in phpdoc CVS), though I have not cheked if those you disabled were used or not...
Just short to the tech-question: The above template is called by e.g.
<xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="phpdoc.object.title"/>
and the above template itself calls another template (substitute-markup), which calls
<xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="title.markup"/>.
So why don't we call immediately the second one, saving 2 steps?
This is a subroutine ;) It jumps to the substitute-markup template with parameters. substitute-markup's default params are not those used here to call it. BTW substitute-markup may call title.markup at the end, but it was not clear to me that this is always the case, and I considered it a wrong customization method to dig down into the templates when the sheets provide abstraction. This method may be slower a bit, but more compatible with future sheets... At least these are my reasons. If this clearly does the same, then feel free to modify the phpweb sheet accordingly.
Goba