Re: Default Rendering of HTML?

	<xsl:template match="/news">
		<xsl:apply-templates/>
	</xsl:template>

This template is redundant, the XSLT processor already provides
such a template for every elemen for you.

	<xsl:template match="item">
		<p>
			<span>
				<xsl:attribute name="class">newsDate</xsl:attribute>
				<xsl:value-of select="date"/>
			</span>

This is overly verbose, writing
  <span class="newsdate"><xsl:value-of select="date"/></span>
should work as well.

<xsl:value-of select="text"/>

This will insert the value of the first text node of the text element
into the result, which is probably white space.
You want
 <xsl>copy-of select="text"/>
here.

Check you favorite XSLT book, one of the online tutorials or
the spec for details of xsl:value-of ann xsl:copy-of (and preferably
xsl:copy too) in order to notice the difference.