Generating separate closing tags in XHTML webhelp output

[Peter Desjardins <peter.desjardins.us@gmail.com>]

Hi. I'm generating webhelp output using the excellent contribution
from Kasun and David
(http://www.thingbag.net/docbook/gsoc2010/doc/content/ch01.html). It
uses the XHTML output stylesheets.

The empty anchor tags in my webhelp output have been collapsed into
single empty element tags like this:

  <a id="foo" />

This makes it hard to style links using CSS because some browsers
don't think the <a /> element has ended and they apply anchor styles
to all the following content (until an anchor element with a separate
closing tag is encountered). This doesn't happen for HTML output; in
HTML output empty anchor elements have separate closing tags like <a
id="anchorname"></a>.

I use Saxon 6.5.5 and I found this posting that indicates separate
closing tags are controlled by the output method:

  http://p2p.wrox.com/xslt/57175-saxon-prevent-closing-empty-elements.html

The webhelp.xsl file in the DocBook webhelp distribution already sets
the output method to HTML but I still see <a id="something" /> in the
resulting XHTML. I'm not sure it's possible to convince Saxon to use
separate closing tags for empty elements in XHTML. Is anyone able to
generate XHTML with separate closing tags using Saxon?

I altered webhelp.xsl from the webhelp distribution so that it imports
from the HTML directory instead of XHTML in DocBook XSL. Now my anchor
elements have separate closing tags and the resulting webhelp seems to
work properly. Why was XHTML chosen for webhelp? Will switching to
HTML cause problems that I haven't encountered yet?

Thanks for your help.

Peter Desjardins