I certainly started out hating it - but I'm beginning to appreciate its power more...

I wouldn't say I think I'm copying it unchanged - I just thought that XSLT v2.0 was providing some extra control of the output namespace during the transformation process with the copy-namespaces attribute. And I guess it is - but just not what I needed (which is a change of its 'native' namespace - not sure what to call it.)

Perhaps the name of the 'copy-namespaces' attribute is a bit misleading... ...seems like maybe it's really 'copy-unused-namespaces' or something like that.

I really appreciate the clarifications/information...
thanks,
e