RE: empty textarea broken in IE6, mozilla

I want nothing to show up in the textarea. This suggestion actually puts the
<!-- comment --> in the textarea which is worse.

Stuart Zakon

-----Original Message-----
From: Wendell Piez [mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002 1:41 PM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re:  empty textarea broken in IE6, mozilla


Stuart,

You could generate a comment in your result instead of a space:

<textarea name="comments" cols="50" rows="5" class="bodytext">
   <xsl:comment> x </xsl:comment>
</textarea>

Such a comment (or processing instruction) is a common workaround when 
targeting HTML or SGML systems that don't like XML empty-element syntax.

But since you didn't say why you need to trim the space I can't say if this 
is actually an improvement.

Cheers,
Wendell

At 01:27 PM 11/14/2002, you wrote:
>I am a bit surprised that empty <textarea> inputs on forms really break 
>the current generation of browsers, both IE 6 and mozilla 1. Here is my 
>XSLT:
>
><!-- Comments -->
><tr valign="top" align="left">
>   <td width="15%" bgcolor="#ffffff" class="bodytextbold">Comments:</td>
>   <td colspan="3" bgcolor="#ffffff">
>     <p>
>       <textarea name="comments" cols="50" rows="5" class="bodytext">
>       </textarea>
>     </p>
>   </td>
></tr>
>
>What happens is that all the HTML on the page after the textarea is 
>shown by the browsers as the CONTENTS of the text area! (You have to 
>see the bug to believe it.)
>
>It appears that the problem is that the XSL processor (Xalan-C) 
>optimizes the empty element as follows:
>      <textarea name="comments" cols="50" rows="5" class="bodytext" />
>
>The browsers absolutely choke on this.
>
>Manually changing the generated HTML to include the </textarea> end tag 
>fixes the problem.
>
>Is there a way to suppress this optimization of empty elements? My 
><xsl:output> method is "html".
>
>I solved the problem temporarily by adding a blank character text node:
>
>       <textarea name="comments" cols="50" rows="5" class="bodytext">
>       <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
>       </textarea>
>
>However, this is a temporary fix because it forces the <textarea> to 
>include the blank which I would have to trim later.


======================================================================
Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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