RE: > replaced by ">", < is not replaced...

> With 'removed' I mean: "replaced by the actual character". So 
> " " 
> becomes a " " (SPACE) in the output, ">" become a ">". 
> This is not what I want. Not because of visualization in an 
> HTML client, but because I have to be able to map the output 
> of the XLS back to some original input which contains the 
> ">", " ", etc. I basically just want to keep the 
> character encodings from the input in the output.

You can't, because XSLT works on the logical data structure, not on its
physical encoding. If you want to manipulate the physical encoding, you need
a lower-level tool.

XSLT programmers shouldn't have to worry about whether a character was
written as itself, as an entity reference, or as a decimal or hexadecimal
character reference.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/