> Another part of my problem was that a literal character #160 was
> mysteriously coming through not as a non-breaking space, but as a Â
> character, which is ANSI #194.

  in an XML document always refers to UCS character code U+00A0. This
character must be encoded upon output in a document. If your document is
encoded as ISO-8859-1 or US-ASCII, the character will manifest as the single
byte A0 (in hex, or 160 in decimal). If your document is encoded with UTF-8,
it will be the pair of bytes C2 C0.

If you are looking at the UTF-8 encoded document in an editor or
shell/terminal window that doesn't know to interpret hex C2 C0 as a UTF-8
sequence, then you'll probably see  (the character in many character
sets/fonts at position hex C2, aka decimal 192) followed by an invisible
character (C0, which if interpreted as an ISO-8859-x character happens to be
invalid in HTML).

If you don't like the encoding your XSLT processor gives you normally, you
can use the encoding attribute on the xsl:output element to specify a
particular encoding (provided your processor knows how to deal with it).

Ref: http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#output


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list