Tim wrote:

<species_comments>The nature of <i>Carcinus maenas</i> is blah blah blah.</species_comments>

This is horrible mixed content stuff, and I am told that this is ipso facto, evil, and we will burn in hell for eternity for considering such a construct...

What I would like to do is have this attribute parsed using XSL and retain the formatting over species names.

Wouldn't we all...

When the text is processed normally the HTML tags are dropped. If it is kept as CDATA the tags are not dropped but also not processed. Any clues how to handle this?

In one test application where plant names embedded in text were surrounded by <taxon></taxon> (more meaningful than <i></i>), I fudged it using fragments like the following xsl:

<xsl:for-each select="note"> <p class="note"> xsl:apply-templates/ </p> </xsl:for-each> .... <xsl:template match="taxon"> <i> xsl:apply-templates/ </i> </xsl:template>

which spewed the output to browser compatible html. The result was a series of note paragraphs with italicised species names... Not very elegant, pretty trivial, and I am not particularly proud of it. But hey, it worked and current IE and NS browsers knew what to do with it...

jim

~ Jim Croft ~ jrc@anbg.gov.au ~ 02-62465500 ~ www.anbg.gov.au/jrc/ ~