XML Rendering problem

Thomas B. Passin tpassin at idsonline.com
Thu Dec 23 14:08:24 GMT 1999


Rajiv Mordani wrote:

> & indicates entities.. So if you need to show the & you should put &
> in place of the &.
>

The HTML standard discusses using & in the url and says it is legal:

"The URI that is constructed when a form is submitted may be used as an
anchor-style link (e.g., the href attribute for the A element).
Unfortunately, the use of the "&" character to separate form fields
interacts with its use in SGML attribute values to delimit character entity
references. For example, to use the URI "http://host/?x=1&y=2" as a linking
URI, it must be written <A href="http://host/?x=1&#38;y=2"> or <A
href="http://host/?x=1&amp;y=2">.

We recommend that HTTP server implementors, and in particular, CGI
implementors support the use of ";" in place of "&" to save authors the
trouble of escaping "&" characters in this manner. "

Spelling it out, you would have in the stylesheet:

<xsl:template match="image">
     <a href="/NASApp/portal/home?tmpl=browse&amp;url=next">
         <xsl:value-of select="imageurl"/>
    </a>
 </xsl:template>

> On Wed, 22 Dec 1999, Georg Edelmann wrote:
>
<snip/>
> > So here is my problem:
> >
> > The following XSL file does not work, rendering it with either the IBM
nor
> > the SUN xml parsers (either using Xalan or Saxon as XSL renderer):
> >
> > ----------------------------------------- stylesheet start
> > <xsl:stylesheet
> >      xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl"
> >      xmlns="hhtp://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40"
> >      result-ns="">
> >
> > <xsl:template match="text()">
> > </xsl:template>
> >
> > <xsl:template match="image">
> >     <a href="/NASApp/portal/home?tmpl=browse&url=next">
> >         <xsl:value-of select="imageurl"/>
> >     </a>
> > </xsl:template>
> >
> > </xsl:stylesheet>
> > ----------------------------------------- stylesheet end
> >
> > The problem lies in the line with the href parameter. The parser
> > interprets '&url' as an html command and wants to have a trailing ';'.
It does not
> > understand that the '&' separates two parameters in the URL.
> > In my opinion that is a serious bug in all the parsers i tested so far.
> >

> > Georg Edelmann
> >

Tom Passin


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