Common Media, Inc. » namespaces http://www.commonmediainc.com Online Communities and Web Development Fri, 06 May 2011 15:10:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 XSL namespaces for HTML output http://www.commonmediainc.com/2009/07/15/xsl-namespaces-for-html-output/ http://www.commonmediainc.com/2009/07/15/xsl-namespaces-for-html-output/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:30:08 +0000 pjmorse http://www.commonmediainc.com/?p=114 One of our current projects involves an application where certain PHP scripts request XML from a SOAP service, then use XSL templates combined with parameters set by the PHP script to generate XHTML from that XML.  (Follow that? If not, you may be able to safely skip this.) We haven’t had to cope with setting up this system, but we did have to update the HTML produced by the XSLT, if that’s the proper verb.

The problem we ran in to was getting around Internet Explorer’s quirks mode. The original XSL templates use a bare xsl:output tag with few options, and a bare html tag to start the output code as well, like this:

<xsl:output method="html" indent="yes"/>
<html>

This produces HTML with no document type and no XML namespace, which means IE is going to go to Quirks Mode, which we don’t want because it hurts our carefully-crafted CSS. We want something more like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/
xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:
lang="en" lang="en">

First, we tried just adding the xmlns attributes to our html tag. This didn’t really help: it added extraneous xmlns="" attributes to many of the child tags in the output document, which quirkified IE just as much as not having the tag.

Solving the second part of the first problem (producing a document type tag) turned out to also be the solution to the second problem (extraneous xmlns attributes). XSLT will add a document type tag automatically if the appropriate attributes are given to the xsl:output tag. Specifically, we wound up with this:

<xsl:output method="html" indent="yes" encoding="utf-8"
    doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" />
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

Notice the bonus encoding, doctype-public and doctype-system attributes. That got us the DOCTYPE tag shown above, and bailed us out of IE Quirks Mode.

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