i have to put up both an english and french version of our terms of service document on the website. the xsl parser yaks on characters such as é etc in the french TOS. what's the easiest way to convert all these to a format that the parser will like that will also display properly in the HTML?

Your description of what you've done is very vague, and using words like "yaks" only makes it vaguer. Perhaps you have actually written the entity reference é in your stylesheet (or your source document) without declaring it? It's a fundamental rule in XML that except for the 5 built-in entities (<, etc) you can't use an entity reference unless you declare it first. You can get hold of standard files that declare all the HTML entity references to include in your document (but you'll have to search for them).

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

I get the error "XML parser error 11: undefined entity" when things like « and è are in the code. I know i can use something like the following, but that gets obnoxious pretty fast...

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&amp;egrave;</xsl:text>

You can download files that declare these entities from

http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xm....3/index.shtml

and incorporate them in your stylesheet by means of an internal DTD.

(Personally though, if I'm using Western European characters I prefer just to use iso-8859-1 encoding and enter the characters directly in their native encoding, rather than using entity references for them.)

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

perfect, thank you!