Joining sibling elements

I'm wondering if it's practical to use XSLT in a following scenario: you
have an XML file which should be reformatted (formatted "tidy") to join
sibling elements, like:

<a><b>this</b></a><a><b> </b></a><a><b>more</b></a><a><b>
</b></a><a><b>text</b></a>

So this is a transformation to keep the resulting file tidy, with less
tagging. I'm planning such a transformation for WordML files before
submitting them for translation where less tagging means higher
translation quality.

Thank you for all advice,
	Marcin Milkowski