Where Does That Non-well-formed Meta Element Come From?

#1 jyurow

Active Member

Group: Members
Posts: 31
Joined: 02-November 10

Posted 16 November 2010 - 02:12 PM

All of the XSL course files generate HTML files that have a malformed meta tag in the head portion of the HTML markup. I see nothing in the XSL file that would generate such a tag, so I am unable to fix it. The malformed tag does not seem to affect the browser's rendering of the HTML, but it clearly offends Oxygen, which gives it a big red mark in the right-hand margin. The tag is:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Note that the above tag is not followed by an end tag </meta> nor does the it end with an "/>".

#2 robbiego

New Member

Group: Members
Posts: 7
Joined: 05-October 10

Posted 29 November 2010 - 10:29 AM

Hi @jyurow

Just wanted to make sure you saw that Bob partially addressed your question in class last week... He uses the following "hack" in the xsl in order to ensure the closing tag doesn't get dropped in the transformation:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<xsl:text> </xsl:text>
</meta>

However, I say "partially addressed" because some of the xsl files from the class omit the explicit meta element, and, as you pointed out, those result in the malformed meta element in the html. I experimented with different transformers but none of them created a correctly-formed meta tag. Hmmmmm.

#3 jyurow

Active Member

Group: Members
Posts: 31
Joined: 02-November 10

Posted 01 December 2010 - 01:14 PM

I tried Bob's hack by copying it word for word and pasting it just after the HTML <head> tag in photoTitleIndex.xsl. I then ran the transformation and, lo and behold, it drops the </meta> end tag from photoTitleIndex.html and then has the unmitigated gall to complain that the </meta> end tag is missing!

#4 Bob Boiko

Active Member

Group: O'Reilly Author
Posts: 19
Joined: 04-October 10

Posted 01 December 2010 - 04:51 PM

QUOTE (jyurow @ Dec 1 2010, 01:14 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Right, well this is not a simple issue. Depending on whether you want HTML or XML output you use a different <xsl:output> statement. I have avoided the issue here alltogether, but I will spend some time on it in the next class.

Here is a video to give you a taste for why I have avoided it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQgOGT4Vnt0