David Schwartz wrote:
> How can I control this more precisely?

XSLT has to assume that whitespace may be meaningful in your output 
document, so in general it doesn't generate any unless you tell it to 
either by copying the newline from your source document or by explicitly 
writing one out with <xsl:text>
</xsl:text>. (Or <xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text> or 
<xsl:text>&#xa;</xsl:text>, which use character references to express 
the line break and may be a bit easier for other folks to read.)

If you are absolutely certain that spurious whitespace won't harm your 
documents, you can also try turning on indentation in xsl:output. In 
some processors you will also have to use a nonstandard feature to tell 
the system how much indentation you want per level. (Xylem assumes 0 
unless you tell it otherwise).

If you're getting whitespace where you didn't want it, that's a 
different set of problems; normalize-space() and xsl:strip-space may be 
helpful knobs to tweak in that case.

-- 
Joe Kesselman / Beware the fury of a patient man. -- John Dryden