Re: breaking up <tags> is hard to do

[David Carlisle <davidc at nag dot co dot uk>]

> Might it be possible to tweak the HTML output method of xsl
> processors to output minimized markup or to drop the closing <TR>
> tag in just before the opening of a new <TR>?

well since several systems are supplied as source I suppose any tweaking
is possible but this would seem a terribly bad thing to do.

XSL output is a tree, It would be reasonable to have an html output method
that used minimised markup where possible but it would _not_ do what you
suggest

The tree

<TABLE>
<TR></TR>
    <TD>row1, cell1</TD>
    <TD>row1, cell2</TD>
<TR></TR>
    <TD>row2, cell1</TD>
    <TD>row2, cell2</TD>

is just simply invalid: the td are not inside a row.

If that markup were presented to an HTML system, a valid but different
tree would be created by inferring extra rows around the TD (but leaving
the empty rows there) Since it is a basic principle that parsing the
output file produce the tree specified in the stylesheet, this would
break the most fundamental design principles of xsl.

 If the system were to automatically get from there to something that
was valid it would effectively mean the output tree had no
correspondence to the result tree specified in the stylesheet, and I
don't see how such a system would be workable (or documentable)

David


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