Re: [xsl] XSLT for usable yet valid XHTML

Subject: Re: [xsl] XSLT for usable yet valid XHTML
From: António Mota <amsmota@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 16:01:55 +0100
What are the diferences you say exist in "practically all current web
browsers" betwen <h3></h3> and <h3/>, since i can't see any? What
would you say are the "current web browsers"? I'm doing some XSLT on
the browser and the subject interest me.


> On Apr 6, 2005 3:52 PM, Jonah Gold <jonah@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hi -
> > 
> > First off, greetings as I am new to this list. I may not be sticking
> > around too long though, I should warn, as I may not be doing XSL dev
> > full-time too much longer. But so long as I'm here I have a question.
> > 
> > We are using XSLT 1.0, parsed by jd.xslt, to transform XML into XHTML.
> > For output we are currently using <xsl:output method="html" etc... >
> > 
> > This obviously doesn't produce valid xhtml - the slash is removed from
> > singleton tags, 'checked="checked"' is transformed to simply 'checked',
> > and some other similar things. This is not surprising, since our method
> > is set to "html", which defaults to html 4, but ideally we would like
> > this not to be the case - we are fairly interested in making our XHTML
> > as valid as possible.
> > 
> > So why, you ask, are we not using 'method="xml"'? This would solve the
> > above problems, true, but we've had problems with it because our content
> > is variable enough that we may have the situation of empty tags (i.e.
> > '<h3></h3>') being converted into singleton tags (i.e. <h3/>) by the
> > parser, which, while valid XHTML, is viewed as an open tag without
> > closure by practically all current web browsers. It is a possibility
> > that we might be able to, say, append a '&nbsp;' to every tag set that
> > might ever be empty, to prevent them from collapsing in this manner, but
> > we'd really rather not, as it will mess up some formatting and generally
> > be a pain.
> > 
> > My question - is there any compromise we can find between these two
> > problems, making our XHTML valid (or at least less invalid) but not
> > causing empty tags to collapse into singletons? I am fairly new to XSLT,
> > so apologies if this is an obvious or ill-advised question. But any
> > advice anyone has would be appreciated.
> > 
> > Thanks!
> > 
> > --
> > jonah

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