Explicit script end tag always converted to self-closing

Asked 3/12, 2008 at 9:49 Answered 4/5, 2015 at 0:3

I'm using xslt to transform xml to an aspx file. In the xslt, I have a script tag to include a jquery.js file. To get it to work with IE, the script tag must have an explicit closing tag. For some reason, this doesn't work with xslt below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
    xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl"
    xmlns:asp="remove">    
    <xsl:output method="html"/>
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
            <head>
                <title>TEST</title>
                <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.2.6.js"></script>

But if I change the script tag as shown below, it works.

        <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.2.6.js">
            // <![CDATA[ // ]]>
        </script>

I thought that the <xsl:output method="html" /> would do the trick, but it doesn't seem to work?

/Jonas

Irresolution answered 3/12, 2008 at 9:49 Comment(0)

If you're creating the XmlWriter yourself you need to pass the transform's OutputSettings to the XmlWriter, eg:

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.LoadXml("<book><author>Trudi Canavan</author><title>Voice of the Gods</title></book>");

XslCompiledTransform transform = new XslCompiledTransform();
transform.Load("XSLTFile1.xslt");

StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder();

// Here we pass the output setting to the writer, otherwise the transform
// may be set to Html, but the XmlWriter will be outputting Xml
XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(output, transform.OutputSettings);

transform.Transform(doc, writer);

Console.WriteLine(output.ToString());
Console.ReadKey();

Beckmann answered 3/2, 2009 at 0:34 Comment(0)

This is quite a common issue when generating HTML from XSLT. I suspect the root of the problem is that the XSLT itself is an XML document. Even though you start with your XSLT programme as serialized XML, by the time the XSLT processor gets it, it's already been de-serialized to an "infoset" representation. At an XML level, an empty tag and a self-closed one are equivalent; the element quite simply doesn't have children. This means that your XSLT processor will probably never see a version of the programme where the script element has both an opening and closing tag.

I usually get round this by using a suitably escaped non-breaking space. In any case, you've got to put something inside the script tag.

By the way - this isn't about making IE happy. If you look at the HTML spec, you'll find that the end tag is required. I'm sure some people will find it ironic that IE implements it correctly. :-)

Dictionary answered 11/1, 2009 at 13:39 Comment(0)

I found this answer on MSDN forum site:

<xsl:value-of select="' '"/>

If you add the above xslt code before the end of your in the xsl file it forces the element to have some content (space in this case) instead of self-closing itself. Tried it and it worked.

This is what it created:

<script...> </script>

instead of

<script ... />.

Fornof answered 20/7, 2011 at 15:5 Comment(0)

This is by design and the only workaround I know of is to use a custom XmlTextWriter :

public class HtmlTextWriter : XmlTextWriter
{
    private readonly string[] fullEndElements = 
        new string[] { "script", "title" };

    private string lastStartElement = null;


    public HtmlTextWriter(TextWriter textWriter)
        : base(textWriter)
    {
    }

    public HtmlTextWriter(string filename, Encoding encoding)
        : base(filename, encoding)
    {
    }

    public HtmlTextWriter(Stream w, Encoding encoding)
        : base(stream, encoding)
    {
    }

    public override void WriteStartElement(string prefix, string localName, string ns)
    {
        lastStartElement = localName;
        base.WriteStartElement(prefix, localName, ns);
    }

    public override void WriteEndElement()
    {
        if (Array.IndexOf(fullEndElements, lastStartElement) > -1)
        {
            base.WriteFullEndElement();
        }
        else
        {
            base.WriteEndElement();
        }
    }
}

Impressure answered 4/4, 2010 at 0:38 Comment(0)

Bart van Delfts answer pointed me in the right direction with this one so cheers for the hint!

I was having this issue as well using [javax.xml.transform.Transformer] Whenever I tried to parse a snippet of formatted html, in my case:-

<textarea></textarea>

the final output from the Node was being brought into my jsp as:-

<textarea/>

which was obviously screwing up any following code, owing to it being seen as more of the contents of the textarea element.

setting t.setOutputProperty(javax.xml.transform.OutputKeys.METHOD, "html"); seems to have provided the self closing behaviour I expected. This property defaults to "xml" from my own testing, so obviously an xml tag with no nodes beneath it is perfectly happy as self closing.

Hope this helps anyway.

Spile answered 10/3, 2011 at 14:32 Comment(0)

consider this example,

<Discount>
       <!--<xsl:if test="Discount>0">-->
             <xsl:value-of select="Discount"/>
       <!--</xsl:if>-->
</Discount>

If i am working with discount for a product. and i am checking it before use. it will return the output of,

<Discount>value of the discount</Discount>

But if i un-comment the above example like that,

<Discount>
       <xsl:if test="Discount>0">
             <xsl:value-of select="Discount"/>
       </xsl:if>
</Discount>

it'll return the o/p after xslt as(if discount is > 0),

<Discount/>

Banner answered 21/6, 2011 at 10:16 Comment(0)

And this is against MS's XSLT engine of course? How strange. I can't say I've encountered this in .NET 1.1 or 2.0 and I have a number of transforms doing exactly the same thing, so I'd suggest you go with the simple workaround.

Ellene answered 3/12, 2008 at 9:59 Comment(0)

I used a comment before script end tag to go through this issue.

Ferdinande answered 9/2, 2010 at 11:45 Comment(0)

For those of you using Xalan 2.7.0 (in Java), I had the same problem. I adopted the org/apache/xml/serializer/ToStream.java file in the original source code to work around this problem. If you specify as outputProperty:

private static Properties XHTML() {
  Properties p = new Properties();
  p.setProperty(OutputKeys.METHOD, "xhtml");
  p.setProperty(OutputKeys.DOCTYPE_PUBLIC,
    "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN");
  p.setProperty(OutputKeys.DOCTYPE_SYSTEM,
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd");
  p.setProperty(OutputKeys.ENCODING, "UTF-8");
  p.setProperty("{http://xml.apache.org/xalan}indent-amount", "4");
  p.setProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
  p.setProperty(OutputKeys.OMIT_XML_DECLARATION, "no");
  p.setProperty("{http://example.com}selfclosing","no");
  return p;
 }

Note the last line on selfclosing. This is a property that is responded to in this renewed version of ToStream.java and will prevent <div /> and <script /> tags and output <div></div> and <script></script> tags instead. It also includes exceptions to these, namely the ones specified in the HTML standard as allowed to be self-closing (i.e. "area", "base", "basefont", "br", "col", "frame", "hr", "img", "input", "link", "meta", "param"). It worked for me at least, and now webpages are rendered fine in IE as well.

The new ToStream.java file can be found at http://bvandelft.ruhosting.nl/ToStream.java and a pre-compiled version of the serializer.jar (working with 2.7) is also available at the same URL but serializer.jar (in which the compiled version of ToStream is included) wasn't allowed to post over 1 URL :-p

Honeydew answered 20/7, 2010 at 14:4 Comment(1)

I am aware that you can add a comment in the script-tag to hack around this as well, however this will not solve the problem of having e.g. empty divs, hence this larger-scale solution. – Honeydew 23/7, 2010 at 8:51

As mentioned, there are tricks with putting an invisible content into the element but in xslt you can always render accurate output as a text:

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">
    &lt;script src="jquery-2.0.3.js"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;
</xsl:text>

Btw. I think that the method="html" should do the trick too, but you will not render xhtml like that, e.g. br will not be closed.

Bareheaded answered 7/12, 2013 at 11:33 Comment(0)

Another quick hack is to add a Javascript comment within the tag:

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.1/jquery.min.js">//</script>

This will just add a comment to the end of the script - be careful that you dont comment anything out by mistake, though!

Uis answered 4/5, 2015 at 0:3 Comment(0)

Hot tags

Godot Unity Godot Help Programming Godot 4.X GUI GDScript 3D 2D Physics CSharp Godot 3.X VR XR Projects C++

Recommended topics

Hot tags