J.Pietschmann wrote:

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.

No, this is correct output, because the stylesheet has a default namespace set
(xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/strict"). The spec calls for XML syntax to
be used when serializing an element that's not in the empty namespace.