To easily insert an attribute containing metadata value in an xslt transformation, the following syntax would be handy. <meta:attribute name="..." element="element-name" ns="http://somedomain.ch/meta" default="default-value" uuid="{@uuid}" lang="{$language}"/> The syntax was suggested by Andreas - thanks! Currently to get attribute metadata one can use two subsequent xsl transformations. see this post: http://www.nabble.com/-2.0.1----question-about-xsl-and-the-metadata-transformer-to15915341.html