I can confirm this problem. It seems that CALS tables work in the ns stylesheet for manpages, but not HTML-markup tables. The namespace processing for tables with <tr> has a bug which I have not isolated yet, so the content gets lost. The workaround until this can be fixed would be to convert to CALS tables, if possible.
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Test Docbook 5.0 that won't render tables
Oh, the XSL processor used is xsltproc, from libxslt 1.1.26. The stylesheet version is 1.77.1.
I just tested with Saxon 6.5.5 and found the very same problem that I did with xsltproc.
I can confirm this problem. It seems that CALS tables work in the ns stylesheet for manpages, but not HTML-markup tables. The namespace processing for tables with <tr> has a bug which I have not isolated yet, so the content gets lost. The workaround until this can be fixed would be to convert to CALS tables, if possible.
A fix for this issue has been added to the current codebase.
Please test the fix with the latest snapshot from:
http://docbook.sourceforge.net/snapshots/
The snapshot stylesheets seem to work at my end.