David Smith wrote:

<textarea name="text"><xsl:value-of select="/root/description"/></textarea>
but when it is parsed, as there is no /root/description element, or it's empty, it comes out like this:
<textarea name="text"/>

This should not happen if the output method was correctly set to HTML.
You should tell something more about your environment. Is the output
of the transformer really a stream?

  String xslFile = "test.xsl";
  PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();
   StringReader sr = new StringReader(xml);

   //instantiate
   TransformerFactory tf = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
   //process style sheet
   try {
     Transformer t = tf.newTransformer(new StreamSource(xslFile));
     t.transform(new StreamSource(sr), new StreamResult(out));
   }