Re: [docbook-apps] <link linkend> in XHTML output

["Michael(tm) Smith" <smith@sideshowbarker.net>]

Andy Smith <andy.docbook@zambezi.org.uk>, 2008-10-02 06:49 +0100:

> 2008/10/1 Lillian Sullam <lsullam@bruxton.com>:
> > 2. In every part of my chunked document the text reacts to any "hovering" of
> > the mouse.  This should not happen, not all of the text is a link.
> [...]
> > I have a feeling this has to do with the <a> tag being closed with a "/"
> > instead of </a>, but why is this happening?
> 
> I think you're right, and you'll see the behaviour you describe if
> your browser is interpreting the file as plain HTML rather than XHTML.
> In plain HTML the </a> closing tag is mandatory, and I guess the
> browser is treating the <a.../> as an opening tag (and acting as if
> there's a closing tag later in the document) rather than an empty
> element.

Yep, because browsers don't parse text/html content as XML -- they
parse it as HTML, and in the HTML syntax that browsers support,
<a.../> means the same thing as <a...> (the HTML parsers in
browsers pay no attention to that slash).

That's just one of several reasons why it's not a good idea to
serve XSLT-generated output@method=xml content as text/html.

[...]
> If you use the stylesheets' HTML rather than XHTML output I think
> you'll get closing tags and results that will generally be OK with the
> text/html content type.

I think that's the best advice in general. For most cases, there
is zero harm in generating HTML content from XSLT using
output@method=html and much good in that it will prevent the
<a.../> problem, and others too.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/