> So, if I am going to create a valid XML document from this,
> I need to open an element in 
> one template but close it in another template describing the other child 
> element.

Elements don't open and close in XSLT. They are nodes that are single
entities. opening and closing tags are a feature of the linearisation to a
file, not a feature of the trees on which XSLT works.
Your "so" doesn't follow, if I followed your premise (which I didn't
completely, a small example would have been clearer) then that sounds
normal XSLT work, but not by generating half a node in one
template and half in another.

> xsl:copy would not put the namespace definition for one of my
> attributes.  
I have no idea what you mean here. XSLT doesn't directly deal with
namespace declarations. If you create or copy a node whose name is in a
namespace to the output tree, then the XSLT system will generate enough
namespace declarations so that when the output is re-parsed the
attributes and elements will be in the right namespaces, but this is an
automatic feature of the linearisation, not something directly under the
control of the stylesheet.


> Specifically, one of the child elements of the root node of the original XML 
> document would have attributes from another namespace than the one that the 
> element is defined under. 

I suspect your terminology here is non standard. a well formed document
can only have one child element of the root node.

>  xsl:copy does not provide a definition of the 
> namespace of the attributes which belong to other namespaces.  Specifically, 
> the namespaces of the attributes were defined in the root element.  I 
> suspect that is why xsl:copy fails to make a valid document in this case, 
> since a straight copy doesn't include a definition of something defined 
> outside the stylesheet.  But I am not sure.  As I said, I did not try 
> xsl:copy-of.

Sorry I can't guess what you mean here.

> http://hnpux3.physics.fsu.edu/~hone/hnpuxpadmin_2003-07-12_10-17-11.959.xml
That's a required result, if you also showed your input documents, I'm
sure someone would suggest a way of doing it in xslt.

In http://www.jlab.org/~hone/gridsubDemo/StartWrap.xsl
You say XSLT has problems outputting < which isn't the case at all.
If you output < using the xml or html output methods, then that
character will be output in a form legal in those formats (eg &lt;)
however this stylesheet appears to be writing a perl script.
If you'd used xsl:output method="text" then when serialising to a text
stream < characters will be written out as < as you'd expect.

David

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