Re: help writing special characters

[Joseph_Kesselman]

>I also tried adding a semicolon after &#125

Mandatory. Leaving that out is why the decimal character reference was
illegal. See the XML spec.

> gave: <outout:apply-templates select="root/{$idName;}"/>

What you wrote, after correction, was
     <outout:apply-templates select="root/{&#123;&#36;idName;&#125;}" />
Note that you put a semicolon after idName. Remove that.