Re: XSLT for usable yet valid XHTML

> which, while valid XHTML, is viewed as an open tag without
> closure by practically all current web browsers.

actually most current browsers (IE, mozilla, opera, etc) can, and will,
correctly parse XHTML (and any XML) If it is served with an XML mime
type rather than an html one. IE (but not the others) then needs a
client side stylesheet to style the xhtml but this can be a single
template
<xsl:template match="/"><xsl:copy-of select="/"/></xsl;template>
mozilla etc don't need this and have native rendering of xhtml.

Howver there are reasons for still using text/html (and so relying on
the non existant error reporting to let XML syntax slip past an HTML
parser)


several possibilities:

a) use xslt2 (saxon 8) which has an xhtml output method specifically to
  address this issue.

b) post process with (eg) tidy to produce "cleaned up and browser safe"
  xhtml.

c) I have a stylesheet I wrote for the MathML specification that 
  takes as input an html producing stylesheet and generates an xhtml
  producing one, making sure that block level elements like p are never
  empty, and making sure that empty elements like br have at least one
  attribute so that you get <br class="jhgf"/> not <br/>.

   It's available in the MathML spec source distribution at
   http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-MathML2-20031021/mathml-source.zip
   I suppose I should put it somewhere else as well.

d) I did (c) but if I was doing it now I would probably write a
   stylesheet that took as input the output of the xml method and just
   did the same changes as in (c) but on teh document itself rather than
   to the stylesheet. that's probably simpler, just templates like
   <xsl:template match="h:p[not(node())]"><p><xsl:text> </xsl:text></p></xsl:template>

David

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