Just want in your opinion the best way to deal with this
issue so I can
adopt it once and forget about it.
My usual practice is to use numeric character references for special
characters in XML, ie. to write it as & #xa0; rather than & nbsp;
You don't need to do anything special in your stylesheet to copy the
NBSP character to the output. There are various ways the serializer can
render it (including as a non-breaking space, which probably won't show
up in your text editor) but they will all have the required effect.
Michael Kay
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list