[oXygen-user] Displaying empty elements (or not)

[Wendell Piez]

Hi folks,

oXygen supports the CSS3 selector :empty, so (for example) we can hide
an element that has no content styled, in the Author View, for
"preview", while showing it in an editing style.

This is useful when, for example, editing documents whose schemas
require elements in places where the user has no content for them. So
if we have

<sect><head/><p>Headless section</p></sect>

we don't have to see anything where the empty 'head' element is, at
least when oXygen Author is set to "No Tags".

Unfortunately, however, since CSS isn't XPath, there's no way to
suppress the 'sect' element, when we have

<sect><head/></sect>

(We can make the 'head' disappear but then we see a placeholder for the 'sect'.)

I know the correct solution is not to deploy schemas that require
elements that are not always used. But I wonder if anyone has a CSS
workaround or an oXygen extension to suggest so that my oXygen XML
Author preview can show something more like what the document will
look like when it is formatted and the offending elements are dropped.

Any ideas?

Thanks, Wendell

Wendell Piez | http://www.wendellpiez.com
XML | XSLT | electronic publishing
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