Removing Attributes from XSLT and working with result set

Question

Is it possible to remove xml attributes from XSLT AND work with the resulting transform?

In other words, I have the following XML:

Answer 1

Many transformations are best split into a pipeline where each stage of the pipeline performs one simple task.

You can do a multi-stage transformation within a single stylesheet (by holding the results in variables, especially with XSLT 2.0), or you can do it using multiple stylesheets. You can control a pipeline involving multiple stylesheets with a variety of technologies (XProc, Coccoon, Orbeon, Ant, xmlsh) or from your own Java/C# code. Using multiple stylesheets has the advantage that the components of the pipeline are highly reusable.