[xsl] line breaks in XML data

[Jim Gay <jgay@xxxxxxx>]

forgive my novice ineptitude.

I am working on a project where we would like to preserve line breaks  
that are entered into our XML database.

We are doing our XSL transformations with version 1.
If I use my XSLT to output/display this data into a <textarea>  
element, the line breaks found in the database are there when displayed.
If I output to a simple <p> element, the line breaks are gone.

How can I keep the formatting when using a <p>?
Can I use something like translate() to look for carriage return  
characters?

I don't know what parser is being used for this application.

Thanks
-Jim