strip-space strips white space text nodes. ie text nodes that only have
white space.
<links>
 <link>     testing pre-stripping</link>

the first child of <links> is a text node consisting of
a newline and a space.
If you had specifed strip-space for links then this would be removed and
so the first child would be the link element.

the link element only has one child, a text node.
As it contains non white space characters it is not removed.
If you want to remove the space from front and back, use the
normalize-space function.

<link  > 
the white space inside a start tag is never even reported by the XML
parser so never has any effect.

David

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