IIRC (but don't ask me why), the XSP engine wraps every text node from the XSP file into <xsp:text> elements.
In the original implementation text nodes were preprocessed and escaped as string constants in accordance to the rules of the target programming language. This took place prior to applying the core logicsheet, where <xsp:text> nodes were to be transparently output as quoted string constants.
An alternative to this was using XSLT extension functions to perform
string escaping inside the core logicsheet itself. This was rejected at
the time because not all XSLT processors supported extensions and they were considered not portable.
Along the way, the XSPMarkupLanguage class was rewritten as a SAX processor and the language-specific escaping was dropped in favor of... XSLT extensions inside the core logicsheet :-)
So <xsp:text> is probably a venerable fossil today. That said, "if it ain't broken..."
Ricardo
