Re: Unanticipated Results from text()

> I rely heavily on leading blanks of to original text.
yes but they are not affected by white space stripping, as they are in
the same text node as non-white space. mxsml's stripping, like xslt's
only affects text nodes that are all-white.

This certainly contributed to my confusion. But I have to admit, not to
have tested the example given above: indent="yes" or indent="no" does
_not_ make any difference.

msxml doesn't actually remove the text nodes, it leaves a secret marker
recording that a text node was there (but not its value), and when
serialising the node, it (usually) inserts a space at that point.
This means that of you xsl:copy-of a branch of the input tree, very
often space appears to be preserved in the result as these hidden
markers get copied, but if you apply-templates and acually costruct a
new tree rather than copying the original, all record of the origial
space is lost.

an MS developer writes about this in this old thread

http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200307/msg00143.html

Your additional remarks saved my day. I have other dubious cases
which I now hope to understand. Thanks,