Hi David and Michael,

Thanks for your help. Removing the extraneous vars and assigning values
to the attributes worked. I also changed indent to no and downloaded sax
6.5, which does much better error reporting.

Now I have one final question. I want to add an attribute/value to the
xml tree only if that attribute does not exist anywhere in the document
source tree.

Is there a way to do that in XSLT?

thanks,

Ann Marie