disabling output escaping within an xsl attribute

I want to generate html output where & (ampersand) characters are not escaped.

Palm VII Web Clipping Applications do not  understand the & character
representation in a URL.
They know how to handle the literal '&' character representation.

Or in other words I want:

http://www.dot.com/service?foo=1&bar=2

and not

http://www.dot.com/service?foo=1&bar=2

I cannot seem to  get disable-output-escaping to work within an xsl:attribute. I
can get it to work for non-attributes. What am I doing wrong ?

Relevant XSL Code fragment
------------------------------------
<*snip*>

<xsl:template match="hedline">
   <xsl:element name="b">
     <xsl:element name="a">
       <xsl:attribute name="href">
         <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes"
select="string('http://www.dot.com/service?foo=1&amp;bar=2')" />
       </xsl:attribute>
      </xsl:element>
     <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes"
select="string('&amp;www.dot.com&amp;')"/>
    </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

<*snip*>

generated the following output:

<b><a href="http://www.dot.com/service?foo=1&amp;bar=2"></a>&www.dot.com&</b>


Note that the disable-output-escaping doesn't seem to work for the href
attribute ( &amp; is retained as &amp;).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

	
-joe




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