how do you prevent or ?

mountainbiker · February 15th, 2005, 05:22 PM

Sometimes our authors create empty emphasis elements which when transformed thru xalan creates tags such as or . what is a good way to exclude these empty elements in the rendering? everything i seem to do is messing up especially in cases where there is actual content, e.g., hello, world.

joefawcett · February 16th, 2005, 04:15 AM

I don't use Xalan but if your transform is using html as its output method then it shoul not render

Code:

<b></b>

as

Code:

<b/>

. You'll have to show more of the transform and source.

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

mountainbiker · February 16th, 2005, 10:37 PM

The output method is as follows:

Code:

<xsl:output method="html" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-Transitional.dtd"/>

This ia some a snapshot of the "offending" template. (Note: The "live" XSLT has these "choices" broken out into individual templates; however, both versions produce the same problem as described.)

Code:

    <xsl:template match="EmphasizedText | Superscript | Subscript">
        <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="local-name() = 'Superscript'">
                <sup>
                    <xsl:apply-templates/>
                </sup>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:when test="local-name() = 'Subscript'">
                <sub>
                    <xsl:apply-templates/>
                </sub>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:when test="@emphasisType = 'i'">
                <em>
                    <xsl:apply-templates/>
                </em>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:when test="@emphasisType = 'u'">
                [u]
                    <xsl:apply-templates/>
                </u>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:when test="@emphasisType = 'b'">
                <strong>
                    <xsl:apply-templates/>
                </strong>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:when test="not(@emphasisType) and name() = 'EmphasizedText'">
                <strong>
                    <xsl:apply-templates/>
                </strong>
            </xsl:when>
        </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:template>

Even if I altered the output method--e.g., say HTML vice XML--both

Code:

<b></b>

and

Code:

<b/>

we would prefer and desire not to render at all.