At ApacheCon, someone asked me, if one could output “escaped” html text with XSLTAL. Like with disable-output-escaping=”yes” in standard XSLT. It was actually not possible, but it is now. Just use “text-escaped” instead of “text” in your TALES and it will add the needed attribute. The update tal2xslt.xsl can be found here.

Furthermore during the presentation I couldn't answer , if XSLTAL can handle namespaces. I just didn't test that, but I didn't see a problem with it. And indeed, as long as you define the namespace in the XSLTAL template and the content-document, it works fine. At least with libxslt, other xslt-processor may behave differently, as I'm not sure about the specs what usually should happen with unused namespace-definitions in input documents (as the namespace is not really used in the XSLTAL template, they are just in the TALES instructions).