so the question is, is there a way to wrap *everything*
inside of an element
in cdata markers, including child xml?
CDATA means "character data". So by definition, it can't contain markup.
Saxon has an extension saxon:serialize() that allows you to serialize a
tree to a string, and then treat the string as character data. This
would meet your needs. Though generally I advice people against XML
structures that hide markup inside CDATA sections - it's much better to
use the hierarchic structure of XML natively.
Michael Kay
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list