one of us didn't understand but i am not sure who :)
i said that I converted our standard character set (iso-8859-8-i a.k.a. windows-1255) TO Unicode. I understood that this is what you guys wanted. No? And iconv did make this conversion.
Why do you say that iconv can't encode the current files?
# iconv -f windows-1255 -t utf-8 mysql-connect.xml -o ~/web/mysql-connect-unicode.xml
#
http://shimi.staff.fresh.co.il/mysql-connect-unicode.xml
The fact that xsltproc does not recognize the iso-8859-8-i means that iconv is probably unable to work with them.
You said: "iconv (the unix utility) supports hebrew only by the non standard representation of it (?) which is windows-1255"
I have tried to find any text you typed which said that windows-1255 and iso-8859-8-i are the same... But I was unable to... This is new information you provided above. Our conversation would not be needed if I would know that before.
But we don't need to convert it to UTF8, who said that? ;) We ned to have some encoding which is recognized by xsltproc first. If windows-1255 is the same as iso-8859-8-i, then this is simply a matter of find/replace in the XML files to replace the encoding names, and then xsltproc will hopefully work.
Goba