Re: [xsl] Outputting closing HTML table tags conditionally

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2003-11-29 14:35 -0800, Mark Jordan wrote:
> I am having trouble understanding how to output closing HTML tags

Yes, that is because you have been misled.  XSLT is *not* an "angle-bracket 
processor" it is a "node-tree processor" ... you have to think nodes, not 
tags. You are approaching the solution improperly by trying to "output 
closing HTML tags", because doing so is not possible in XSLT.

Since you need to express all of your expected output as nodes in your 
stylesheet, your stylesheet is in XML.  Thus, your stylesheet needs to be 
well-formed.  Therefore, you cannot plan your algorithm to just output end 
tags, because end tags are not nodes, they will be created by the processor 
when emitting nodes, but they are not part of your input.  They happen to 
be in your input syntax because they *describe* nodes, but they are *not* 
your input ... the nodes they describe are your input.

So, inside your <xsl:if> you will have to represent entire nodes (using 
start and end tags) in a well-formed fashion, and the processor will build 
the output using these nodes and when serializing these nodes to the result 
file will give you the necessary start and end tags or empty tags as required.

> My stylesheet (with XML declaration, <xsl:output> and root template XSL 
> ommitted) is:

You will have to change your algorithm to the following:

 <table>
   <xsl:for-each select="image">
     <xsl:if test="position() mod 4 = 0">
       <tr>
        <xsl:for-each select=". | following-sibling::image[1] |
                              following-sibling::image[2] |
                              following-sibling::image[3]">
           <td><!--stuff for each iamge--></td>
        </xsl:for-each>
      </tr>
    </xsl:if>
  </xsl:for-each>
 </table>

You can see how the above is well-formed.

> Anybody have any suggestions? All I want to do is output 
> '</tr></table><table><tr>' within xsl:if.

But that would not be well-formed.  If you stop thinking about tags and 
think instead about nodes, the solution should come to you.

I hope the above helps.

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

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