Hi 
Guess I did not frame my question properly earlier. When using xalan to transform an xml which has one of its namespace declaration as xmlns:z="#RowsetSchema" using an xsl which has a corresponding name space declaration as 

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0" xmlns:s="uuid:BDC6E3F0-6DA3-11d1-A2A3-00AA00C14882" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C14882" xmlns:rs="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:rowset" xmlns:z="#RowsetSchema">

I get the error :
javax.xml.transform.TransformerException: Extra illegal tokens: '#RowsetSchema',
 ':', 'row', '/', '@', 'MESSAGE_TYPE', '=', ''UTILTS E29''

Surprisingly this works fine with saxon and other parsers. 
Snippets of my XML and XSL's

<xml xmlns:s="uuid:BDC6E3F0-6DA3-11d1-A2A3-00AA00C14882" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C14882" xmlns:rs="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:rowset" xmlns:z="#RowsetSchema">
<xml>
	<s:Schema id="RowsetSchema">
		s:ElementType name="row" content="eltOnly">
			<s:AttributeType name="MESSAGE_TYPE" rs:number="1" rs:nullable="true" rs:writeunknown="true">
				<s:datatype dt:type="string" rs:dbtype="str" dt:maxLength="10" rs:fixedlength="true"/>
			</s:AttributeType>....
	</s:Schema>
	<rs:data>
	<z:row MESSAGE_TYPE="UTILTS E29" MESSAGE_NUMBER="3000" MESSAGE_DATE_TIME="2004-02-04T23:09:08" 				BALANCE_SUPPLIER_EAN="12" BALANCE_RESPONSIBLE_PARTY_EAN="Grid1" GRID_AREA_EAN="8716959259711" 		METERING_PERIOD_FROM="2002-12-24T13:45:00" METERING_PERIOD_TO="2002-12-25T13:45:00" ACTIVE_ENERGRY="E" 	REASON="RECONCILIATION" SETTLEMENT_METHOD="profiled" PERIOD_START="2002-12-24T13:45:00" PERIOD_END="2003-01-	24T13:45:00" VOLUME="101" VOLUME_TYPE="Z01" TIME_FRAME="E10" TIME_RESOLUTION="15" MEASUREMENT_UNIT="KWH"/>
	</z:row>
	
</xml>

My XSL
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0" xmlns:s="uuid:BDC6E3F0-6DA3-11d1-A2A3-00AA00C14882" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C14882" xmlns:rs="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:rowset" xmlns:z="#RowsetSchema">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="no" indent="yes" encoding="ISO-8859-1" version="1.0"/>
<xsl:template match="xml">................</xsl:template></xsl:stylesheet>


Guess am more clear now.
thanks
-Satish


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