I wanted to give you an example of how I have been coding and get you to help me understand why it's poor coding (if it is). The technique worked fine through several testing environments but when it got moved to production it suddenly started producing bad (whitespace related) resuts.

This is how I have been coding:
<Purpose>
<xsl:attribute name="tc">1000800007</xsl:attribute>
Guarantee Minimum Future Income
</Purpose>

Through testing this normally produces:

<Purpose tc="1000800007"> Guarantee Minimum
Future Income </Purpose>


But when the xslt was moved to production it produced this:

<Purpose tc="1000800007"> ..........Guarantee Minimum
Future Income.......... </Purpose>


I know that all the dots represent spaces, newline codes and tabs. I guess two questions. One, any idea why it transformed ok in one environment but not in another. Two, is the way I am coding just flat out bad coding and if so what would be the proper way to code.

I can't see exactly where the whitespace is in the stylesheet or hte output so it's hard to be sure which is right; also you haven't given any details of how the transformation was run or what serialization parameters were used.

The xsl:attribute instruction here is quite unnecessary, you could use a literal attribute in the stylesheet:
Generally it's probably good practice to surround literal text in the stylesheet with an xsl:text element to get better control of whitespace handling.

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