merging of text-nodes and CDATA

Hi,
given the following XML fragment:

<strval>
  <![CDATA[bla ]]>
</strval>

and the famous identity transformation from the XSL spec:

<?xml version="1.0"?> 
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml"
            indent="yes"
	    cdata-section-elements="strval"
/>

<xsl:strip-space elements="strval"/>

<xsl:template match="@*|node()">
  <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I get the following back:

<strval><![CDATA[
  bla 
]]></strval>

This is with Xalan-J and sablotron. My understanding is that the
parser generates three text nodes:
- one containing the first '\n' after <strval> and a couple of spaces,
- one containing 'bla '
- one with the closing '\n'

These three are merged in one and than whitespace stripping is
performed.

I'd like this order to be reversed: first strip whitespace and than
only merge the textnodes. The result would thus be:

<strval><![CDATA[bla ]]></strval>

, as the first and last node only contain whitespace. This, btw, is
how the XML parser in the application interprets the source fragment.

Note the space after bla, which I don't want to loose. No
normalize_text(), which will eat that space as well.

Now my questions:
- Is the order of merge/strip specified somewhere in the XML or XSL
  specifications?
- if not, does somebody have an XSL processor which does it my way?
- can I get the behaviour I want with XSL?

Thanks for your help,
Klaus-Georg Adams





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