> Using normalize-space is the only way I've found to eliminate the
> newlines, 

don't do that. 
do this (came up on this list not so long ago...)

<xsl:template match="*/text()">
   <xsl:value-of select="translate(.,'&#10;',' ')"/>
</xsl:template>


(you don't need the */, all text nodes are children of an element so
match="*/text() is same as match="text())

David

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