Re: [xml] empty tag

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 10:55:40PM -0500, Alex Neblett wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> Somewhat related, is it possible to preserve <tag></tag> rather than have it
> convert to <tag/> when doing an xslt tranform?

  No, they are not distinguishable once parsed, they have exactly the same
data model, it's actually something clearly stated in the XML-1.0 spec

> I am using libexslt to transform xml into xhtml.
> 
> Sadly, the consumer of the xhtml content (to which I do not have source code
> access) is issued and sometimes interprets <tag/> as <tag> then
> "autocorrects" the xhtml by inserting a </tag> where it deems appropriate
> causing all sorts of issues.

  Their application is not XML compliant, too bad they didn't ask for
something compliant to the standard. Note that libxml2 XHTML-1 serializer
do use <br /> and other crazy suggestions to workaround non-XML aware clients
make sure you are outputting the XHTML-1 doctype and libxml2 will take care of
it.

> Presently, I do a second xslt transform to place comments inside empty tags
> resulting in <tag><!-- DELETE THIS --></tag> as a poor workaround.
> 
> Probably, I am not the first person to encounter this problem and am also
> open to alternative suggestions as to how to solve this issue.

  Yup, that's poor, unfortunately there is no magic spell. Have you tried
inserting an empty text node, I think that should be sufficient to fool 
libxml2 serializer and force an end tag. However at the XSLT level I'm not sure
<xsl:text/> will really do what you want, it might be optimized out.
  XML recommendation was issued in 1998, 8 years ago, if they still use
non-compliant tools, then as your customer they force you to develop custom
code, hence more expensive I assume, make them pay the difference, they
will end up fixing their stack eventually.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat http://redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/