HTML in XML

Jim Croft jrc at ANBG.GOV.AU
Thu Dec 20 16:09:26 CET 2001


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 at anbg.gov.au ~ 02-62465500 ~ www.anbg.gov.au/jrc/ ~




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