Wow... that was most awesome.  Thanks for the help, it really made a lot of
sense.  And indeed, I do need to be careful of HTML tags becoming malformed.
Once the XML has been propery serialized in a text area element, what is the
proper way to deserialize it?

Karl


----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Brown" <mike@xxxxxxxx>
To: <xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 7:44 PM
Subject: Re:  Fw: Select entire XML doc [FURTHER]


> Karl Stubsjoen wrote:
> > Further:
> > I need to preserve the XML data as XML, so maybe change the output of
the
> > template to XML.  Is that possible?
> > Thanks,
> > Karl
>
> Browsers are lenient when they encounter markup inside a textarea.
> It is actually an error to do something like
>
>   <textarea><someothertag>foo</someothertag></textarea>
>
> which is what you are generating. You are supposed to generate
>
>   <textarea>&lt;someothertag&gt;foo&lt;/someothertag&gt;</textarea>
>
> Presumably you are outputting with the HTML output method. If your XML
> contains any HTML elements in an empty namespace, you will find that they
> will be output in HTML syntax, which means for example that <br/> will
come
> out as <br>, thus making your textarea contain non-well-formed XML, which
> presumably is not what you want.
>
> These two reasons are why you want to output your XML in serialized form.
To
> understand what we mean by "serialized form" you must first understand the
> concept of a node tree (the DOM-like tree that XPath and XSLT uses) as
being
> the parsed, deserialized representation of an XML document, and you must
> understand that your stylesheet only provides instructions for creating a
new
> node tree; the xsl:output instruction merely provides a hint to the
processor
> as to how you would prefer that new node tree to be serialized after it
has
> been constructed.
>
> What you want to create in your node tree is (here in my best ASCII art):
>
>   element 'textarea'
>     |
>     |___text '<lotsOfXml/>'
>
> Understand that the serialized form of these two nodes when using the html
> or xml output methods would be
>
>   <textarea>&lt;lotsOfXml/&gt;</textarea>
>
> which is what you want.
>
> What you have done by using xsl:copy-of is created something like:
>
>    element 'textarea'
>      |
>      |___element 'lotsOfXml'
>             |
>             |___element 'childOfLotsOfXml'
>             :
>             ...
>
> In other words you took the whole source tree, sans the root node, and
copied it
> into the result tree as a child of the textarea element. This was then
serialized
> as
>
>
<textarea><lotsOfXml><childOfLotsOfXml>...</childOfLotsOfXml></lotsOfXml></t
extarea>
>
> and as I noted above, if you used html output method, any 'br' or 'hr' in
your XML
> would come out as <br> and <hr>.
>
> What you should do is look into using either an extension function that
serializes
> the XML in an HTML character data safe way, or use a template that does
the same thing.
> Evan Lenz wrote a nice one at http://www.xmlportfolio.com/xml-to-string/
>
> All you need to do is import it and then call the xml-to-string template,
passing a
> parameter named node-set, which is the set you want to serialize:
>
> <xsl:import href="xml-to-string.xsl"/>
>
> <xsl:template match="/">
>   <textarea>
>     <xsl:call-template name="xml-to-string">
>       <xsl:with-param name="node-set" select="."/>
>     </xsl:call-template>
>   </textarea>
> </xsl:template>
>
> Mike
>
> --
>   Mike J. Brown   |  http://skew.org/~mike/resume/
>   Denver, CO, USA |  http://skew.org/xml/
>
>  XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
>
>


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