RE: strip-spaces

> So the golden rule for dealing with xmlns="" is to look at 
> your stylesheet as XML and it should be clear where the problem is.

The other golden rule is, remember that namespace declarations are only
surface syntax. For a given element (whether in the source, the stylesheet,
or the result document) you need to be aware of (a) what the namespace URI
part of the element name is, and (b) what the in-scope namespaces for that
element are. Namespace declarations are the surface way of revealing that on
input and on output, but they don't play any role during processing.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/