What happens if you do the following

<div class="someClass">&nbsp;</div>

Damn it stripped the text - I wonder if this will work  

Hi Bogdan,

This is the curse of Microsoft's XSLT processor; Problem is, it's not really violating the spec (in XML there is no difference between the long and the short version of an empty element, and in HTML some tags are required not to have a closing tag) so what cab we do?

Personally, I use "xml" mode and test for non-empty content before writing an element that could be rendered empty, e.g.:

<xsl:if test="normalize-space(.)">
    <div class="someClass"><xsl:value-of select="." /></div>
</xsl:if>

- But you can always put an empty comment inside an element to force generation of a closetag:

<div class="someClass"><xsl:comment /></div>

- which will output as:

<div class="someClass"><!----></div>

Hope that helps,

/Chriztian

It's always a good idea to test if there is any content like Chriztian is mentioning. Empty tags in the source code does not make any sense! :)

/Jan

<div class="someClass">&#160;</div>

Yes, this is annoying "feature" especially when adding <script src="somthign.js"> because in IE whole pages gets empty.

I do the same has Jorge suggest above, just add &#160;

Not very beatiful but works.

i use <xsl:text> </xsl:text> inside any empty elements, makes for a bit cleaner markup inside the xslt, and renders a space in the output xhtml.

Hi Bogdan,

As you guess, the MS-XML processor is working correctly ... by self-closing the empty tags (in XML mode).

Following on from Chriztian's suggestions, I prefer the following XSLT:

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[<div class="someClass"></div>]]></xsl:text>

This allows for literal mark-up... the XSLT processor will just output it as is.  Sure, it looks long-winded, but that's just the super-long "disable-out-escaping" attribute, (which we all would agree is ugly as sin!!)

Alternatively, go with "html" output and change your doc-type to HTML4 ... nothing "wrong" with it, it's just dated and we everyone feels that XHTML is purer.

Cheers, Lee.

Hey all,

First of all thanks for your quick replies. So far I'll go with Chriztian Steinmeier's solutio:

<div class="someClass"><xsl:comment /></div>

It's the cleanest one so far in my opinion.

@Jan Skovgaard: I agree with you about empty tags, but in this particular case the tags are used for page layout only.

Thanks everyone for your input on this. If someone out there is got an even better solution I'm more than happy to hear it.

Cheers,
Bogdan

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