DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: DOCBOOK: Bug?

[Bob Stayton <bobs at caldera dot com>]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 04:48:36PM +0100, Stefan Priebsch (e-novative GmbH) wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> we've just experienced the following: when creating an empty title
> (<title></title>) for a table and creating XHTML using the 1.57.0
> stylesheets, the </a> is missing in the list of tables HTML, which screws
> up the following line, of course.
> 
> Is there anything wrong on my side or does this happen to be a bug?


[moving this to the docbook-apps list]

What you are seeing is actually a closed XML element:

2.1. <a href="#id2792719"/>
                         ^

The trailing slash closes the empty element.
This is perfectly valid XML, but HTML browsers don't
understand it.  This is one of the incompatibilities
between XHTML and many current browsers.

You may ask why the stylesheet doesn't output something
like this instead:

2.1. <a href="#id2792719"></a>

The stylesheet actually does specify a closing </a> tag
in the template, but the processor converts it.
The xsl:output method for XHTML is "xml", which means
the XSLT processor decides how to output empty elements.

-- 

Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
Publications Architect                      Santa Cruz, CA  95060
Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
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                                            email: bobs@sco.com