> is there any way to get an xsl style sheet to produce
> something that isn't proper xml?

Not with "standard" XSL.

SAXON XSL has an option saxon:escape="NO" which allows you to output arbitrary text files. The effect is that all angle-brackets, etc, are output "as-is" rather than being escaped to "<" etc. You can apply this option either to the whole output file or to any section of it. There are two ways of using it (a) to generate things other than XML/HTML (e.g. Perl scripts, EDI messages); (b) to get round restrictions when generating XML, e.g generating "unmatched" tags.

Mike Kay
SAXON is on http://home.iclweb.com/icl2/mhkay/saxon.html