2004 April 14 archive at rewindlife.com

I’ve been working with a lot of XSLT recently related to our BLDoc project. In the case of one of the translations, I had a need to create a resulting document that used only empty XML elements, such as:

<element />

However, no matter what I did the XSLT always produced elements like this:

<element></element>

Technically, the above two are equivalent according to XML guidelines. However, there are two situations where one might prefer the first over the second. (1), it saves bandwidth in large documents and (2) not all XML handling engines are really XML compliant.

In my case, I’m dealing with Flash MX 2004 help content which is not an XML compliant parser. It throws errors when you have closing tags in the custom actions file.

A search of Google Groups turned up about a thousand responses as usual, most of which politely said “it doesn’t matter, they’re the same thing, and if the XML parser you’re working with thinks they’re different then it’s not a compliant parser.” Unfortunately, I’m stuck with the parser built into Flash MX 2004 which is non-compliant.

I finally came across one helpful post that suggested creating the elements as text instead of using real tags.

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><identifier text="</xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="@name" /><xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">" /></xsl:text>

Which worked great.

This helpful answer actually came from an official support address at Microsoft. Kudos to them for answering the question and holding off on the theoretical slander.

One caveat is that it’s real easy to create invalid XML documents when creating elements from text–you have to make sure they’re well formed and all content is entity encoded.

rewindlife.com

Archive for April 14th, 2004

How to make auto-complete work in custom components in Flash MX 2004

Make empty elements with XSLT