Re: [xsl] Understanding why <tag></tag> is the way it is (was Re: [xsl] IE Client side transformation issue)

Subject: Re: [xsl] Understanding why <tag></tag> is the way it is (was Re: [xsl] IE Client side transformation issue)
From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2007 07:38:13 -0400
At 2007-08-02 19:22 -0600, M. David Peterson wrote:
On Thu, 02 Aug 2007 19:14:32 -0600, Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
About the spec thing, isn't it something from SGML heritage? I mean,
didn't XML introduce the shortcut <br /> for <br></br> thus disallowing
the SGML <br> on itself (without closing tag)? And wasn't it also SGML
heritage that allowed <option selected> and XML forced more strict rules
and made it <option selected="selected">?

Oh, that's definitely a question for Tommie or someone else with similar SGML background like G. Ken Holman, Dr. Kay, or David Carlisle.

I do not know the context of the posted question above, but XML only introduced the abbreviated indication of the empty element as in "<br/>", not "<br />" ... the latter being merely taking advantage of the syntax rules for a start tag. XHTML has a set of "compatibility guidelines" that recommend the use of the space in order to get around problems in browsers that were not written as SGML applications but just as simple angle-bracket processors.


Using method="xml" in XSLT 1.0 still produces XHTML, but without the compatibility guidelines (which are in an informative annex, not in normative text).

The group of SGML features that were tossed in XML for the second example were the "markup minimization features". In SGML tokenized attributes needed to be mutually exclusive so that an SGML instance could specify only the attribute value and the processor would know which attribute was being specified.

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . . . . . Ken

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