Re: [docbook-apps] <link linkend> in XHTML output

From
Stephen Taylor <>
Date
2008-10-02T08:59:33+00:00
ID
Thread
Re: [docbook-apps] <link linkend> in XHTML output
Ian Hicks' name appears as co-author on several W3 standards. His enlightening discussion of the perils of serving XHTML to browsers (notably IE) that don't handle it persuaded me to prefer serving HTML:

http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

Stephen

2008/10/2 Michael(tm) Smith <>

Andy Smith <>, 2008-10-02 06:49 +0100:

> 2008/10/1 Lillian Sullam <>:

> > 2. In every part of my chunked document the text reacts to any "hovering" of

> > the mouse.  This should not happen, not all of the text is a link.

> [...]

> > I have a feeling this has to do with the <a> tag being closed with a "/"

> > instead of </a>, but why is this happening?

>

> I think you're right, and you'll see the behaviour you describe if

> your browser is interpreting the file as plain HTML rather than XHTML.

> In plain HTML the </a> closing tag is mandatory, and I guess the

> browser is treating the <a.../> as an opening tag (and acting as if

> there's a closing tag later in the document) rather than an empty

> element.

Yep, because browsers don't parse text/html content as XML -- they

parse it as HTML, and in the HTML syntax that browsers support,

<a.../> means the same thing as <a...> (the HTML parsers in

browsers pay no attention to that slash).

That's just one of several reasons why it's not a good idea to

serve XSLT-generated output@method=xml content as text/html.

[...]

> If you use the stylesheets' HTML rather than XHTML output I think

> you'll get closing tags and results that will generally be OK with the

> text/html content type.

I think that's the best advice in general. For most cases, there

is zero harm in generating HTML content from XSLT using

output@method=html and much good in that it will prevent the

<a.../> problem, and others too.

  --Mike

--

Michael(tm) Smith

http://people.w3.org/mike/

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