Another mystery is how to give more than one. http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-xquery-serialization/#XML_CDATA-SECTION-ELEMENTS says "The cdata-section-elements parameter contains a list of expanded QNames." Lo and behold http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Serialization reveals how this is done... separated by whitespace! E.g., declare option output:cdata-section-elements "names addresses"; Which one would never have guessed from the W3 document. P.S., maybe change all those = in the http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Serialization examples... OK, I guess so far I've only used them in the prolog...