Re: [docbook-apps] Generating separate closing tags in XHTML webhelpoutput

Hi all,

    I've face this problem myself, in particular with the <a>
    element and xhtml output. The trick is to use pseudoclasses so your
    rule only applies only to links and not to anchors: 

    

    a:link    { 

        color: #00589E;

        } 

    

    In fact, I think it was someone on this list that clued me into that
    :-)

    

    Using xhtml output, you might also run into formatting problems if
    users accidentally include empty tags like <literal/> or
    <emphasis role="bold"/>. For that you might have a schematron
    rule warn them or have a preprocessing xslt prune the empty element
    or break the build with an informative error message. 

    

    David

    

    On 03/04/2011 10:02 AM, Kasun Gajasinghe wrote:
    Hi Peter,

      

      
On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 8:54 PM, Peter
        Desjardins <>
        wrote:

        Hi. I'm generating webhelp output using
          the excellent contribution

          from Kasun and David

          (http://www.thingbag.net/docbook/gsoc2010/doc/content/ch01.html).
          It

          uses the XHTML output stylesheets.

          

          The empty anchor tags in my webhelp output have been collapsed
          into

          single empty element tags like this:

          

           <a id="foo" />

          

          This makes it hard to style links using CSS because some
          browsers

          don't think the <a /> element has ended and they apply
          anchor styles

          to all the following content (until an anchor element with a
          separate

          closing tag is encountered). This doesn't happen for HTML
          output; in

          HTML output empty anchor elements have separate closing tags
          like <a

          id="anchorname"></a>.

          

          I use Saxon 6.5.5 and I found this posting that indicates
          separate

          closing tags are controlled by the output method:

          

           http://p2p.wrox.com/xslt/57175-saxon-prevent-closing-empty-elements.html

          

          The webhelp.xsl file in the DocBook webhelp distribution
          already sets

          the output method to HTML but I still see <a id="something"
          /> in the

          resulting XHTML. I'm not sure it's possible to convince Saxon
          to use

          separate closing tags for empty elements in XHTML. Is anyone
          able to

          generate XHTML with separate closing tags using Saxon?

        
        

        

        
We faced the same problem when we included the
          <script> tag too, since it too has an empty tag when
          including the JS src. We circumvented this issue by adding a
          xsl comment like this. 

        

        

        
<script type="text/javascript"
          src="javascript:void(0);">

        
 
               <xsl:comment>some comment</xsl:comment>

        
</script> 

        

        

        
May be this is not a solution for your usecase, but with
          this you can get something
          like <a id="anchorname"><!--some
          comment--></a>. 

        
 

        I altered webhelp.xsl from the webhelp
          distribution so that it imports

          from the HTML directory instead of XHTML in DocBook XSL. Now
          my anchor

          elements have separate closing tags and the resulting webhelp
          seems to

          work properly. Why was XHTML chosen for webhelp? Will
          switching to

          HTML cause problems that I haven't encountered yet?

        
        

        

        
The main issue with HTML is with the html-search feature.
          To properly retrieve the content text excluding the html-tags,
          the html files should be in a proper format. Strict XML is the
          standard way for this. That's the concern here. I haven't
          encountered any other major issue in switching to html!

        

        

        
Looking at your mail, I'm assume you are switching from
          html to xhtml, right? If so, have you encountered any concerns
          that needs some major effort? If so, tell us about it, we'll
          see about the possibility of supporting to html format too. 

        

        

        
Thanks for the compliments Peter! :)

        

        

        
--Kasun

      

      

      -- 

      ~~~*******'''''''''''''*******~~~

      Kasun Gajasinghe,

      University of Moratuwa,

      Sri Lanka.

      Blog: http://kasunbg.blogspot.com

      Twitter: http://twitter.com/kasunbg