Re: [xsl] <empty /> vs <empty></empty?

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

At 2005-12-11 14:21 +1100, Eric Scheid wrote:
> Is there any way to control whether empty elements appear as
> <empty></empty>, instead of <empty/>?

No, that is outside the specification.  A vendor might offer that as 
a feature, but there is no control in the W3C spec.

> My problem is that some browsers don't like <div/> or <a name="x"/>, not
> recognising that they both begin and *end* there, thinking instead they are
> opening tags only.

Indeed ... in my class I use the following as an example (note that 
one has to first substitute "< " with "<" as I've escaped the markup 
so this will work in mailers):

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
< !DOCTYPE html
 PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd";>
< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";>
< head>
 < title>test< /title>
 < meta http-equiv=
       "Content-type" content='text/html; charset="utf-8"' />
< /head>
< body>
< div>Div is normal< /div>
< div style="font-style:italic">Div is italic< /div>
< div style="text-decoration:underline" />
< div>No underline< /div>
< div style="font-weight:bold">< /div>
< div>No underline or bold< /div>
< /body>
< /html>

The above works just fine in Opera and in Firefox, but not in 
Internet Explorer.

This presents a problem when the transformation doesn't find content 
and ends up producing the empty element in the result tree:  the 
formatting for that empty element "bleeds" to the end of the document.

> As a workaround, I believe I can do this:
>     <a name="x"><xsl:comment> empty </xsl:comment></a>

Kewl!  I hadn't thought of forcing it that way.  Thanks!

. . . . . . . . . Ken

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