Question

Using XHTML inside a XSLT-styled document

Asked by: spule

Hello. I have the following problem (described in XML comments).

<!-- I have an XML file that looks like this: -->
<page>
  <paragraph>
  Some <strong>text</strong> here.
  </paragraph>
</page>
 
<!-- I then transform this XML into an XHTML document using an XSLT stylesheet. In that stylesheet, I have the following piece of code. For every "paragraph" element in the input, it writes a "p" element to the output and copies the contents of the "paragraph" element into the "p" element. -->
<xsl:for-each select="paragraph">
  <p>
    <xsl:for-each select="./node()">
      <xsl:copy-of select="." />
    </xsl:for-each>
  <p>
</xsl:for-each>
 
<!-- The problem is that in the input XML, the tags defined by me and the XHTML tags aren't semantically distinguished. I would like to write something like this: -->
<page xmlns:ht="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <paragraph>
  Some <ht:strong>text</ht:strong> here.
  </paragraph>
</page>
 
<!-- Here it is clear that my tags aren't in any namespace, while XHTML tags are in the XHTML namespace. Unfortunately, this does not work. The output document then ends up like this: -->
<p>Some <ht:strong xmlns:ht="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">text</ht:strong> here.</p>
<!-- Which is unwanted (browsers don't understand it) and also unnecessary (everything in the document is in the XHTML namespace so there is no need to define a new prefix for it). -->

                                  
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Asked On
2009-09-05 at 15:12:43ID24710303
Tags

XSLT

,

XHTML

,

XML

,

stylesheet

,

transformation

,

markup

Topics

Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT)

,

Extensible HTML (XHTML)

,

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
22

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Answers

 

by: GertonePosted on 2009-09-06 at 04:20:07ID: 25269459

This is what I think you need
Note also the use of templates instead of for-each.... it is a much better style of programming XSLT

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:template match="page">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="paragraph"/>
</xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="paragraph">
        <p>
            <xsl:apply-templates mode="xhtml"/>
        </p>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="*" mode="xhtml">
        <xsl:element name="{local-name()}" namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
            <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
            <xsl:apply-templates mode="xhtml"/>
        </xsl:element>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

                                              
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by: GertonePosted on 2009-09-06 at 04:22:04ID: 25269462

This generally makes more sense,
stuffing the <p> in the same namespace

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:template match="page">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="paragraph"/>
</xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="paragraph">
        <xsl:element name="p" namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
            <xsl:apply-templates mode="xhtml"/>
        </xsl:element>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="*" mode="xhtml">
        <xsl:element name="{local-name()}" namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
            <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
            <xsl:apply-templates mode="xhtml"/>
        </xsl:element>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
                                              
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by: spulePosted on 2009-09-06 at 10:40:37ID: 25270784

Thank you very much! Can you please explain me, step by step, what exactly this example does? I could never fully understand the apply-templates element, especially the mode attribute.

 

by: GertonePosted on 2009-09-06 at 13:27:34ID: 25271354

Well, you need to consider templates as some sort of rules.
If you push a certain node to the templates, the processor will check which rule fits best the description of the node
This "pushing" can be done using "apply-templates"

So, if I have this
<xsl:template match="page">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="paragraph"/>
</xsl:template>
Then that means that all the child <paragraph> elements of <page> will be pushed to the templates
These nodes will be picked up by the template for "paragraph"
and the actions found in that template will be executed on these nodes

You can consider mode as an extra parameter for rule matching
if you say
            <xsl:apply-templates mode="xhtml"/>
all children of the current context will be pushed to the templates,
but only the template rules with a mode="xhtml" will be evaluated

 

by: GertonePosted on 2009-09-06 at 13:31:27ID: 25271369

line by line

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
the stylesheet will start processing at the page element
<xsl:template match="page">
    all paragraph children of the current context will be pushed to the templates ***
    <xsl:apply-templates select="paragraph"/>
</xsl:template>
*** this template will pick up processing of the pushed paragraph node
    <xsl:template match="paragraph">
        create an element with no prefix but in the xhtml namespace
        <xsl:element name="p" namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
            push all text nodes and child nodes and all to the templates, but only evaluate the templates with the same mode +++
            <xsl:apply-templates mode="xhtml"/>
        </xsl:element>
    </xsl:template>
    +++ exectute this template with all the element childs of paragraph, but also with deeper nested constructs
    <xsl:template match="*" mode="xhtml">
        <xsl:element name="{local-name()}" namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
            <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
            push all text nodes and child nodes and all to the templates, but only evaluate the templates with the same mode +++
            <xsl:apply-templates mode="xhtml"/>
        </xsl:element>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

 

by: spulePosted on 2009-09-07 at 10:01:50ID: 25276234

Also please explain me this: the first template matches the root page element, whilst the third template matches every element. How come that the first template is applied to the entire document, and not the third one?

 

by: spulePosted on 2009-09-07 at 10:51:30ID: 25276429

Thanks for your solution. When I test it in Firefox, it works as expected. But when I try to run the transformation in NetBeans, it doesn't work. It generates this:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title>Test page</title>
</head>
<body>
<ns104:p xmlns:ns104="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Some <ns105:strong xmlns:ns105="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">text

then it stops and throws an error:

Using com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerImpl - default JRE XSLT processor.
javax.xml.transform.TransformerException
       at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerImpl.postErrorToListener(TransformerImpl.java:773)
       at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerImpl.transform(TransformerImpl.java:716)
       at com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerImpl.transform(TransformerImpl.java:313)

I am posting my stylesheet and my input file.

 

by: spulePosted on 2009-09-10 at 13:13:41ID: 25303806

In Internet Explorer, it seems to work, whereas my approach didn't. But why doesn't it work in NetBeans?

 

by: spulePosted on 2009-09-10 at 13:18:05ID: 25303845

In IE 6 it doesn't work though. When I navigate to that XML file, IE shows some errors and opens it in an external editor.

 

by: GertonePosted on 2009-09-10 at 14:09:47ID: 25304394

I don't understand why it doesn't work in netbeans. There is a flaw in their namespace handling in the XSLT processor I am afraid.
Can you trace what the Processor is?

The behaviour in IE is normal if you installed an editor on the same machine which you indicated to be the default editor for XML. That is a problem with internet explorer. I avoid setting any editor as the default for XML in order to avoid this behaviour

 

by: GertonePosted on 2009-09-10 at 14:10:17ID: 25304403

I will check your full XML and XSLT tomorriow, it is close to midnight here, time for bed

 

by: spulePosted on 2009-09-11 at 05:17:15ID: 25308585

I'm afraid it's not normal IE behavior. Other XML files (whether XSLT-styled or not) work for me in IE6. Just this one causes problems. It even shows an error when I try to open the error window by clicking that yellow warning icon at the bottom-left...

 

by: GertonePosted on 2009-09-11 at 13:40:42ID: 25313295

what error does it show?

I tested your files with every possible XSLT processor (at least 8) on my laptop, in 5 different browsers
No problems found, and seriously, from the code, I would know what is wrong.
I think it is a flaw in Netbeans, I will check a Virtual Machine with IE6 later

 

by: GertonePosted on 2009-09-11 at 13:41:14ID: 25313298

"I would know what is wrong"
should read
"I would NOT know what is wrong"

 

by: spulePosted on 2009-09-11 at 14:41:21ID: 25313658

It shows the following window.

 

by: GertonePosted on 2009-09-11 at 14:43:22ID: 25313678

Can you reproduce that on another machine?

 

by: spulePosted on 2009-09-12 at 00:33:47ID: 25315522

Thanks for your tip! Actually, I can not reproduce it on other user accounts either. (I use MultipleIEs.)

 

by: spulePosted on 2009-09-12 at 01:14:38ID: 25315598

I tried another approach: setting the XHTML namespace as the namespace for the whole document and making up my own namespace, using it with a namespace prefix. It doesn't work as expected, though. What am I doing wrong? The output in Firefox is:

<result>
    Some text.
</result>

                                              
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by: GertonePosted on 2009-09-12 at 01:24:57ID: 25315618

This works as you would expact,
but the namespaces in XSLT and XML are not equal
xmlns:x="http://ondra.cifka.com/xmlns/2009/webpage" in XML
versus
xmlns:x="http://ondra.cifka.com/xmlns/2009/website" in XSLT

 

by: spulePosted on 2009-09-12 at 01:27:06ID: 25315624

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't notice...

 

by: spulePosted on 2009-09-12 at 01:28:31ID: 31625355

Thank you very much, you taught me a lot!

 

by: GertonePosted on 2009-09-12 at 02:01:31ID: 25315680

welcome

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