It was an expedient solution on the presumption that he could and
was going to look at the schema.

yes but looking at the schema doesn't help, if the schema/dtd defaults
shape="rect" on every a element (as the HTML4 one does) and you don't
want those but do want the 1 in a million times where someone has
shape="rect" in their source, then you can't just remove all attributes
that are defaulted by the schema, you have to stop the schema defaulting
attributes. You can do that by commenting put the doctype or using a
catalogue to point to a dtd that doesn't default or in newer saxon
releases at least by using a command line switch to tell the system not
to add the defaults.

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