Re: [xml-dev] HTML Include in XSL document

[bob mcwhirter <bob@werken.com>]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, Magick, Brian wrote:

> Perhaps someone can help:
>  
> I'm using XML / XSL to recreate a web site of static html pages.  The
> current html pages reference an includes file:  <!--#include
> virtual="/includes/leftmenu.html" --> which I am trying to plug into the
> XSL file (not the XML) to generate to the new pages.

For some reason, your XSL stylesheet is seeing your XML comments as
just plain text, and doing escaping for you.

> When I generate the pages the XSL Transformation changes the "<" and ">"
> to "&lt" and "&gt".  My resulting includes statement now looks like
> this:  &lt;!--#include virtual="/includes/header.html" --&gt;  Which
> outputs the text <!--#include virtual="/includes/leftmenu.html" --> in
> my browser rather than calling the include statement.  Apparently to
> call an include you MUST have the < and > and not the entity references.

Yah, because it's actually just a comment as far as the XML/HTML is
concerned, but your server looks inside the comment for meaningful
information.  (Which, btw, tends to be a Bad Practice, but unavoidable
using SSIs, of course).

> Can someone advise me how I can force <!--#include
> virtual="/includes/leftmenu.html" --> to convert to html rather than
> &lt;!--#include virtual="/includes/header.html" --&gt.

Maybe select comment nodes using the comment() node-type test from XPath,
to copy them into the output file.  Dunno, I'm not an XSL kind of guy.

	-bob