[xsl] •

[Greg Martel <gregm at wolfram dot com>]

I did not find this on the XSL list FAQ even though it is closely 
related to many other questions that are there.

Why doesn't this XML content:      •
produce this output:               •

after parsing/xslt in my xhtml document???


It's bloody nigh impossible to get my XML parser (Xalan-Java) NOT to 
recognize entities except for this one case where recognizing it 
would solve all my problems. The xsl list FAQ under "Entities" item 
13 "Passing Entities through a Transform" says that all entities are 
resolved before the transform and implies the only way to get around 
this is with a perlscript to strip entities of their ampersands. This 
cannot be the whole truth because:
a) xalan won't resolve &#amp; in the above example and b) everyone 
trying to produce html for posting would be screwed by having XML 
docs with proper unicode references--nobody could set set stuff up so 
cruelly (right?) c) In XSLT quickly, there's an example of how to 
define entities in the xsl stylesheet using <xsltext> to avoid this 
(p.90-91)--only you can't use this technique on a numbered entity 
because evidently that's not valid xml so they don't exist, even 
though they're all over the place.

I know this is an old subject; but after hours of investigating, I 
still don't get it. I need to know why the above example doesn't 
produce the right numbered entity reference, and what other ways 
there are to preserve entities through a transform, and possibly how 
unicode/numbered entities are defined and can be redefined. There 
just has to be a way to do this within xslt. I'm sorry that I still 
don't get this--please help anyway, somebody.
--
Thanks,

gregm

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