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Re: [xsl] element minimisation (again)


Subject: Re: [xsl] element minimisation (again)
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 12:02:32 -0400

At 09:31 AM 8/12/2003, Mukul wrote:
i agree with David. its not a bug. <node></node> and
<node/> are same according to the spec.

I agree with this, and yet the Andrew is not the only XSLTer who faces requirements for particular syntactic forms in the output serialization, for whatever reason.


In my experience these are best handled in a post-process. If you know which serializer you are using (and processors generally come with their own), this can even be done in XSLT ... making allowance for a couple of little hacks or workarounds, such as comments or PIs (or spaces, as Andrew says) to split open elements you don't want collapsed, etc.

Cheers,
Wendell

--- Andrew Welch <AWelch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Someone just asked me why <node/> was coming out of
> the transform as
> <node></node>.  After trying out some of the
> processors, it seems msxml
> x when used with an identity transform doesn't
> minimise.
>
> So, this stylesheet:
>
> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
> xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
> <xsl:template match="@*|node()">
>   <xsl:copy>
>     <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
>   </xsl:copy>
> </xsl:template>
> </xsl:stylesheet>
>
> On this source:
>
> <node/>
>
> Produced:
>
> Msxml3        <node></node>
> Msxml4        <node></node>
> Saxon         <node/>
> Xalan         <node/>
>
> Now the reason this has particularly annoyed me is
> because I've always
> wanted the ability to tell a processor 'don't
> minimise the elements'.
> After a few long dicussions on the list it seemed
> that it wasn't really
> feasible (or there wasn't enough momentum behind it)
> to have a feature
> like this, but obviously that's just down to
> interpretation.  Lots of
> people have had the same issue, and lots of people
> are adding &_#160;'s
> to their output to prevent it.
>
> This just appears to be an MSXML bug, but it
> would've been nice to the
> option.


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