I don't understand... text is always output?

An empty stylesheet returns the text of all elements:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/XSL/Transform/1.0">
</xsl:stylesheet>

This also happens when the stylesheet is not empty.. for example, when
it contains templates.

This is not intuitive to me.  What was the thinking behind this?  
I only want text in particular elements to be output.  
Are there other things that get output by default?

Is there a way to filter out text besides adding the following 
template?  

<xsl:template match="text()"/>






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