XSLT self-closing tags issue

Question

Hi, I am using xslt to transform an xml file to html. The .net xslt engine keeps serving me self-closing tags for empty tags.

Example:

<div class="test"></div>

becomes

<div class="test" />

The former is valid html, while the latter is illegal html and renders badly. My question is : How do I tell the xslt engine (XslCompiledTransform) to not use self-closing tags.

If it's not possible, how can I tell my browser (IE6+ in this case) to interpret self-closing tags correctly.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Change your xsl:output method to be html (instead of xml).

Or add it if you haven't already got the element

<xsl:output method="html"/>

Answer 2

You can't tell your browser to handle invalid HTML as HTML -- you're lucky it understands malformed HTML at all. :)

Definitely do this in your stylesheet:

<xsl:output method="html"/>

But, if your source document has namespaces, this won't do the trick. XSLT processors seem to silently change the output method back to XML if namespace nodes are present in the output.

You need to replace all instances of <xsl:copy-of> and <xsl:copy> with creations of elements with just the local name, e.g.

<xsl:template match="*">
   <xsl:element name="{local-name()}">
     <xsl:apply-templates/>
   </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

See

• http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/200708/msg00538.html
• http://www.stylusstudio.com/xsllist/200509/post90860.html
• http://www.richardhallgren.com/removing-namespace-from-outgoing-messages/

etc.

Answer 3

If you are using XmlWriter as your ouput stream, use HTMLTextWriter instead. XMLWriter will reformat your HTML output back to XML.

Answer 4

This is related to the XslCompiledTransform class

here is a workaround:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nareshjoshi/archive/2009/01/15/how-to-force-non-self-closing-tags-for-empty-nodes-when-using-xslcompiledtransform-class.aspx