I'm using XSLT to generate XHTML-compliant code, and I'm trying to figure out a way to force it to include the close tag on an empty element.

The element in question is <textarea>. I've tried a few solutions, and am using some on other elements, but they dont work with textarea. To be clear,

• output: html won't work, because it needs to be valid XML
• Inserting dummy characters like '' inside won't work, because everything inside a <textarea> is treated like CDATA and is included in the field as editable text. Using a space or a return isn't a good solution either because then the form will submit it as part of the data (unless I hack every page on the server to remove it, which I'd rather not.)

I do have a solution, but it's extremely ugly, and won't work if I ever pass the XSLT processing onto the browser (since Firefox won't let you insert elements this way). But it works for now:

    <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[<textarea id="input_description" name="description" cols="45" rows="5">]]></xsl:text>
        <xsl:if test="description"><xsl:value-of select="description" disable-output-escaping="yes" /></xsl:if>
    <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[</textarea>]]></xsl:text>

If I want to include generated content inside the <textarea> element, this gets very ugly very fast.

Anyone else have a solution?

Thanks!

XSLT outputs a result tree, it doesn't output tags (unless you use the disable-output-escaping hack). It's the serializer that takes the result tree and produces appropriate tags.

If you're generating XML, use <xsl:output method="xml"/>. The serializer will decide whether to use <textarea></textarea> or <textarea/>. In XML, both forms are completely equivalent, so any consumer of the XML will accept either.

If you're generating HTML, similarly, use <xsl:output method="html"/>, and the serializer will decide which form of tagging is appropriate.

If you're generating output to be read by something other than an XML parser or an HTML browser, then you may have a problem. The official answer in such cases is to write your own serializer.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

Oh, I should have said that XSLT 2.0 has <xsl:output method="xhtml"/>, which will try to produce output that is valid XML but respects the conventions for making the XML acceptable to legacy browsers. This option isn't available in standard XSLT 1.0 though it's offered by some XSLT 1.0 processors. With 1.0, the best answer is to generate two outputs: HTML for the browser, and XML for everyone else.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference