XSL, XT, and ruined well-formed HTML

Ok... what i want to do is parse an xml doc with a stylesheet and get HTML.
This works fine.  However, I need that HTML to be well-formed, as I plan to
use it as the xml starting point for another pass through the parser, with a
different stylesheet.  Well, I run into a problem.  XT ruins the
well-formedness of my document.  It converts all of my <br /> tags to plain
<br> with no end tag.  It does a similar thing to all the other empty tags.
Well this [expletive deleted]... I changed the output type to xml, and that fixed that
problem, but then I ran into the problem with all the &nbsp's in the
documents. (the UTF-8 problem)

So, I am in desperate need of either of two answers.

HOPEFULLY, how to get XT to stop ruining the well-formedness of the
documents... (doesn't this violate the XHTML rec. anyhow?), or how to
overcome the UTF-8 problem I run into with the text output solution?

Thank you for any answers... I assume that someone else out there has tried
to do this before me.  And hopefully ti won't involve actually going through
the source code and changing it.  I want to leave it as is... I don't want
to ruin something that isn't otherwise broken.

Thank you.

Duke Nickolas
different e-mail address if you wish...
dnickolas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


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