Re: [xsl] Open Meta Tag problem

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Karl,

At 03:31 PM 5/20/2010, you wrote:
> This seems like such an ancient topic, but here it goes...
>
> I have the following:
> <xsl:output indent="yes" doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
> doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"/>
>
> The resulting HTML document has a bad content-type meta tag:
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
>
> (It is not closed)

This is not "bad" unless by "bad" you mean "not XML". And HTML is not XML.

HTML -- more to the point, the variant of HTML your stylesheet 
believes it should produce -- is an application of SGML, in which 
this particular tag (and indeed, any other tags for elements declared 
in its DTD as EMPTY, such as 'img' and 'br' and 'hr') need not be 
matched with a corresponding close tag.

> I've tried various doctypes and the results seem to be the same.  How
> do I solve this?

If you want XML syntax, you need to configure your XSLT processor to 
give it to you.

This can generally be done quite easily:

<xsl:output indent="yes" method="xml"/>

> Also, while on the subject, what doctype do you use, and why?

This very much depends on the local requirements.

If using the doctype that you have cited (PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD HTML 
4.01//EN), however, I probably would *not* use method="xml", but 
instead method="html" (which is what you are getting, probably 
because your processor infers from the name of the document element 
of your result, 'html', that this is what you want). This is because 
the HTML 4.01 DTD is an SGML DTD not an XML DTD, and W3C-conformant 
HTML 4.01 processors do not expect those particular tags to be closed.

If I knew, on the other hand, that I needed the output to be 
well-formed XML, I would probably use method="xml" to ensure as much, 
along with an XHTML doctype.

I hope this helps --
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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