Re: Preserve HTML formatting when apply-templates in

 append="true">

is the source of your problems it's not a very functional (in the sense
of functional programming) way of doing things (functional programming
historically has a problem with IO as leaving or reading messages 
has the whiff of state change about it:-)

However for writing log files you probably need something like this.
rather than do 
  <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&lt;/root&gt;</xsl:text>
It might (or might not) be slightly cleaner to _not_ have a wrapper
element, and just have your log as an external parsed entity, this is
often more convenient, lots of processes find it more efficient just to
append to a list of elements than to keep the file a well formed
docuent.
if log.xml is your log then you can have a well formed document version
of it by having the (fixed) file of the form

<!DOCTYPE wrapper [
<!ENTITY log SYSTEM "log.xml">
]]>
<wrapper>
&log;
</wrapper>


>  or should I just figure it ain't broke so  don't fix it?
that, probably:-)

David

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