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XML to "HTML"

• From: "David A. Lee" <dlee@calldei.com>
• To: XML Developers List <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
• Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:04:41 -0500

I'm faced with the 'interesting' request of the web team to produce HTML 
not XHTML.

The request came to encode empty elements like  <BR/> as <BR>  (and 
<HR/> as <HR>)
The rationale is that they are trying for maximum browser compatibility 
and CSS style capabilities.

Although they could not actually point to an actual current case where 
using XTHML syntax breaks things, nonetheless they are insisting on not 
using it,
"just in case" , "for maximimal conformity".

They also requested that if I use a tag that takes bodies but the body 
is empty to not write it as <tag/>
Example
    <P/>  should be written as <P></P>  ....  although I think I can 
waffle on this one.

So I'm tasked now with having to convert reasonably good HTML into 
'perfect' HTML mainly fixing up these empty tags.

Any suggestions ? The proposal from the web team was "Just use perl to 
do regex replacements" ... Ug.
I'm not going to use perl.   But I might resort to the equivlent of 
using Java regex replacements on the final output phase.
But maybe there is a 'better' way to do this ?   I'm not enough familiar 
with XSLT to know but it does have an "html" mode ... will it do this 
kind of thing ?
I'm hoping I don't need to write my own serializer and have to actcually 
*parse* the 'HTML' to generate these reqirements ... so maybe a regex is 
the best fit ?
I'd love to run it through a trivial xquery or xslt filter in "make the 
web team happy" mode ...

Other suggestions welcome.

-- 
David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com  
http://www.calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org
812-482-5224

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