> I pass it in it 
> is a string - I am not surprised that it is a string, that is 
> whay I am using exslt:node-set in the first place, however 
> maybe it is not coercing correctly. 

It seems to be a common misunderstanding that xx:node-set() will parse a
string containing lexical XML and return a document node representing the
result of parsing the XML. It's possible that there may be some
implementations that do this. But the EXSLT spec[1] says that if you pass a
string as the argument, the result will be a text node whose string-value is
the same as the supplied string.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/

[1] http://www.exslt.org/exsl/functions/node-set/index.html