removing tab formatting during XSLT?

Could someone please enlighten me on how I can remove tab formatting from my 
resulting XML.

Here's an example:

Source XML:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<A>
        <B att="att">a</B>
        <C>b</C>
        <D>c</D>
</A>

Desired output XML (i.e. the same as input but with all tabs removed):

<?xml version="1.0"?><A><B att="att">a</B><C>b</C><D>c</D></A>

XSLT (which doesn't work):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";>
        <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="no"/>
        
        <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
        
        <xsl:template match="/">
                <xsl:apply-templates/>
        </xsl:template>
        
        <xsl:template match="*">
                <!-- recreate the element -->
                <xsl:element name="{name()}">
                        <!-- copy existing attributes-->
                        <xsl:for-each select="@*">
                                <xsl:copy/>
                        </xsl:for-each>
                        <xsl:apply-templates/>
                </xsl:element>
        </xsl:template>
        
        <xsl:variable name="tab">nbsp;</xsl:variable>
        
        <xsl:template match="text()">
                <xsl:value-of select="translate(. , $tab , '')"/>
        </xsl:template>

        <!-- original attempt   
        <xsl:template match="text()">
                <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/>
        </xsl:template>
        -->
 
</xsl:stylesheet>

I want to remove the tabs because this significantly reduces the size of the 
file.

Thanks in advance.

cheers

Malcolm

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