[xsl] double escaping problem

[pkeane <pkeane@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My apologies is this is repeat material, but I was unable to find the 
answer by searching the archives.

I am building a web application based on REST-based web services.  It is 
digital asset repository/management tool and all of the "data" in the 
system lives in a relational database but is exposed to the rest of the 
application by way of XML documents accessed over http.  The entire user 
interface is constructed using xslt which consumes and "mashes up" these 
services to present html pages to the user.  There is a site-wide XSLT 
stylesheet and a sitewide "layout" xml file.  Each request is mapped to a 
small script which invokes an XSLT processor, and specifies the 
page-specific stylesheet to use (this page-specific stylesheet will 
"include" the site-wide stylesheet).  The "source" is the site-wide 
layout.xml and all of the rest of the data comes from service documents 
which are grabbed by way of the xslt document() function.  The controller 
(the small script that the request was mapped to) passes parameters to the 
processor specifying URLs for the data documents.

So...a request for "http://example.com/collections"; will use 
the collections.xsl stylesheet which will in turn invokes 
document(http://example.com/xml/collections) which returns an xml document 
listing the collections.

Unfortunately, I have a double escaping problem I cannot seem to get rid 
of, short of using translate(@my_text,'amp;','') when an ampersand appears 
in any of the text from the service document.  The service documents, of 
course, have already had ampersands escaped and my  process escapes them 
again, so I get  "Art & Art History Collection" being presented to the 
user (view source of the html shows "Art & Art History).

Disable-output-escaping makes no difference (I believe because output is 
set to be xml -- I am using xhtml strict doctype).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-Peter Keane
daseproject.org