Re: [xsl] XSLT for usable yet valid XHTML

[Robert Koberg <rob@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Do you want to strip emtpy elements (that are not supposed to be empty) 
or do you want to leave them in but not have them closed?

You could just use your company's CMS...

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-Rob



Jonah Gold 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