My confusion was that I was inserting the xml section into an <xsl:comment> element, rather than a no-namespace-prefix <comment> element. Now that I've cleared up that bit of mental muddle, I'm proceeding along the path suggested by Michael Kay, namely, use a bit of post-processing to swap the <comment></comment> for &lt;!-- --&gt;.

Since the whole shebang is orchestrated through ant, it's a trivial matter to insert another task in the processing stream to make the swap.

Thanks for your interest.
-- 
Charles Knell
cknell@xxxxxxxxxx - email



-----Original Message-----
From:     Jon Gorman <jonathan.gorman@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent:     Tue, 2 May 2006 12:58:52 -0500
To:       xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject:  Re: RE:  Producing Excel 2000 htm files: how do I manage the hidden stuff

On 5/2/06, Jon Gorman <jonathan.gorman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 5/2/06, cknell@xxxxxxxxxx <cknell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > The direct answer is, "Because I didn't think of it." Having now tried it, I can tell you that it strips away all the XML markup from the document, leaving only the element contents.
>
> It creates an comment, just like xsl:element.

That being "It creates a comment, just like xsl:element creates an element."

That might make my point a little clearer.

Jon Gorman