Re: RE: Producing Excel 2000 htm files: how do I manag

The direct answer is, "Because I didn't think of it." Having now tried it, I

can tell you that it strips away all the XML markup from the document, leaving
only the element contents.

It creates an comment, just like xsl:element.  The content of the
comment are determined by what the xsl:comment element contains.
Remember that a comment doesn't contain markup (since it is after all,
just text).  So when you have a element somewhere in the template, it
returns just the text value.  (Just as if you evaluated an element as
a string elsewhere in XSLT).

If you want to complate the sin of inserting functionality in a
non-functional part of the xml document, you'll need to tell it what
text you want to output (ie the "looks like markup" but is not).

<xsl:template match="*" mode="insideComment">
    <xsl:text>&lt;</xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="name(.)"
/><xsl:text>&gt;</xsl:text>
<xsl:apply-templates />
<xsl:text>&lt;/</xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="name(.)"
/><xsl:text>&gt;</xsl:text>
  </xsl:template>

Of course, I wonder more:
1) Why not just do it in the Excel xml format if your target is Excel
2000.  I thought that was more well supported and documented for the
2000 version?

2) Why not use some other XML techniques (SAX or DOM) or libraries in
conjunction with XSLT to produce an Excel binary?  This is an approach
I find myself taking, but mostly because of a mixed user base who
might be still using versions of Excel earlier than 2000.