GOTCHA!

["Oren Ben-Kiki" <oren@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For all those who are fighting against the restriction that XSL processors
will emit only valid XML, here's a way out which works at least for XT. I'd
be very interested to know whether it works in other processors and whether
it is a valid trick (it probably isn't).

Suppose you have a rule which goes:

<xsl:template match="...">
<xsl:comment> --&gt;
Whatever I damn please, including &lt;, &amp;!!!
&lt;!-- </xsl:comment>
</xsl:template>

Running this through XT will emit:

<!-- -->
Whatever I damn please, including <, &!!!
<!-- -->

Several notes:

- People who want to generate character entities can do:

<xsl:comment> --&gt;&amp;nobs;&lt;!-- </xsl:comment>

Which will be converted to:

<!-- -->&nobs;<!-- -->

Wrapping this in a CharacterEntity macro is left to the reader :-)

- Suppose I gave up the "--&gt;" and "&lt!--" in the template. I'd still get
whatever I please, but it would be contained in an XML comment, and the
output would be valid XML. I assume this was the original intent. The fact
that XT hasn't caught it is probably a bug that James will be quick to fix
:-)

- This is actually good enough for me, since the non-XML output I want to
generate is JavaScript code inside HTML documents, and the following is
valid, thanks to old browsers which don't know JavaScript:

<SCRIPT>
<!--
Any JavaScript code. In JavaScript "<!--" starts a comment just until the
end of the line.
// -->
</SCRIPT>

So even if James or the W3C plugs this hole, it is still possible to
generate legal JavaScript code, with "<", ">", "&", and so on.

- This can be adapted to any language which has any comment mechanism: for
example:

// <!--
Any C++ or Java code
// -->

# <!--
Any perl or shell code
# -->

And so on.

Isn't this fun?

    Oren Ben-Kiki.


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