Re: Control over html output

Hi Andy,

> In this case the linebreak causes undesirable whitespace to appear
> in the resulting document in certain browsers. At the moment I'm
> having to rely on the rather crude solution of setting the html
> output indent to "no" to avoid this, but this seems a rather
> inelegant solution...

That's the most elegant solution you'll find :)  By default,
processors indent HTML output, which means they can add whitespace to
make it easier to read.  The indent attribute on xsl:output is
specifically designed to control that.

> On a similar note, is there any way to specify strict xhtml output?
> I've experimented with adding the xhtml doctype declaration but this
> hasn't really affected the output of the elements, e.g. <br/> in the
> stylesheet still gets output as <br> in spite of the doctype...

The rules for the html output method say that <br/> must be output as
<br> and so on. If you want well-formed XML output, such as XHTML,
then you should tell the processor that's what you want:

  <xsl:output method="xml" />

You can then set the doctype-public and doctype-system as you know,
and use the XHTML namespace as appropriate.

However, you should be a little careful doing this.  The XML
serialisers usually serialise in a way that breaks the HTML
compatibility guidelines in XHTML 1.0 (e.g. they output <br/> rather
than <br /> and use empty element for everything.  Some processors
have a special extension XHTML output method to bring XHTML output
into line with the guidelines - I don't know if Xalan has.

I hope that helps,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/



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