Looking at this again my example was wrong. The output in this case is actually
barbaz
and it should be
<ul><li>bar</li></ul>
I agree it's very weird and I can't explain it. Let's me think out loud about it generically for a minute. What could possibly cause the plain text content of the input document to appear as output? If it the plain text content of the stylesheet were output, then I'd say the XSLT namespace in the stylesheet was incorrect. What could cause this behavior but generate the plain text content of the input document?
Perhaps, if nothing matched at all? That would do it.
OK. How could that happen? The processor would somehow have to not match any rules in the stylesheet to the output document. The most likely candidate here is a namespace mismatch. I'll have to double check the namespaces on the sending side to see that they match the stylesheet.
Still, that doesn't even begin to explain why a manual transform with the same stylesheet succeeds and a cron-driven one at least some time fails. Very strange.
