RE: how to match <br/> tag

That was good - somehow I managed to reply to David's post... (which
contained the answer I was looking for anyway)

oh well :)


-----Original Message-----
From: David Carlisle [mailto:davidc@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 27 June 2002 16:46
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re:  how to match <br/> tag


>    "<br/> is a short form of <br></br>"
> 
> But, be advised that thinking any element with no descendant elements
can be
> expressed this way, becase that's not true ... especially in the case
of the
> xhtml:br and possibly the html:{BR | Br | bR | br} element.
> 
> Being able to express an element in the abbreviated manner is totally
> dependant on the intent of the given elements schema.
> 
> In this case, xhtml:br or html:{BR | Br | bR | br} is an empty
element, it
> cannot have any attributes or descendant entities as <br></br> does,
which
> has one (empty) text node.
> 
> So, with respect to xhtml or html, "br" cannot be of the form
<br></br>, it
> must be (ignoring casing/namespace) <br />.
> 
> Because, <br></br> will not validate against the xhtml schema ... it
may be
> ok against the highly tolerant html schema--but, I'm not sure.
> 
> -Jeff

No this is wrong. <xxx/> is in _all_ circumstances identical to
<xxx></xxx>
in XML irrespective of DTD or schema declarations. This equivalence is
clearly explicit in teh XML specification.

Some browsers can not cope with <br></br> but that is because the do not
parse XML and only tolerate it because they try to parse the XML as HTML
they silently ignore parse errors. 

No DTD or schema validator (or XSLT processor) can distinguish <br/>
from <br></br>.


David

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