Special characters and XML-to-WML problem

Subject: Special characters and XML-to-WML problem
From: "Michael J. Hudson" <mhudson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 17:08:04 -0400
To Joe Kesselman:

WML, all in all, is just HTML reduced... so method="HTML" actually
works the best, just that you can't specify the root tag for the
DOCTYPE to WML.  It defaults to HTML and won't let you change.  You
could post-process... but simply creating your DOCTYPE in a CDATA
area in your root template seems to do the job just fine as well.
However, I was wondering if there might be a better way...

You could always do post-processing... but the ideal solution would
be if you could deal with all this mess at just the XSLT level.  

To Mike Brown:

Well, the usual answer of "you should never need an unescaped ampersand"
has never seem to work for me.  I've been told this before, but I don't
see when this eventual conversion was suppose to happen with either
HTML,
or WML.  The creation of the URL for the HREF attribute happens in the 
XSLT script.  And the end result document, be it HTML or WML never has 
the unescaped ampersand and when you send that page to either to a 
web-server or read through a WML-gateway, neither one converst these
entities either.
So, yes... if you have an XML file with entities, and then do an XSLT
script, the resulting file has those entities resolve.  But if those
entities are expressed in the XSLT script, they don't get resolved.  
Thus you get a slightly wrong document as an end result.  


In an ideal world, I just wish the XSLT spec allowed you to declare
your root tag even when the output method is HTML.  Then this problem
would be completely solved... since the HTML method deals with
ampersands
in HREF attributes correctly.  

-------------------------------------
Michael J. Hudson
Software/Framework Engineer
mhudson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

cell-phone: 703.362.8039
voice-mail: 703.827.0638 ext. 4786
fax: 703.734.0987

Blueprint Technologies
"The E-Solution Architect" 
http://www.blueprinttech.com


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