preserving markup

Disable-output-escaping should be an absolute last-resort solution;
there is almost always a better way.

If your stylesheet needs to force the content of some elements to be
output as a CDATA section to support broken downstream processing, use
xsl:output's cdata-section-elements attribute.

Though personally I consider that a hideous concept. No properly-written
downstream application should care whether you use <![CDATA[]]or
individually escape characters; semantically those two approaches are
exactly the same. I grant that some older tools are broken in this
regard, but ... yecch.

If your stylesheet needs to force the content of some elements to be

Quote: output as a CDATA section to support broken downstream processing, use xsl:output's cdata-section-elements attribute.

Thanks for the quick response Joel. Not sure what you mean by 'broken
downstream processing'. I'm outputing HTML (and Javascript), not XML.
cdata-section-elements appears to be appropriate only where
method=xml. Perhaps I'm missing something?

Is this what you had in mind?

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/
Transform">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" method="html" cdata-section-
elements="code"/>
<xsl:template match="code">
<div style="MARGIN-LEFT: 30px">
<xsl:value-of select="." />
</div>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

David Schwartz wrote:

Quote: If your stylesheet needs to force the content of some elements to be Quote: >output as a CDATA section to support broken downstream processing, use >xsl:output's cdata-section-elements attribute. > Thanks for the quick response Joel. Not sure what you mean by 'broken downstream processing'.

Browsers. Most (all?) of them are hopelessly broken when it comes to
handling XML. Fortunately...

Quote: I'm outputing HTML (and Javascript), not XML.

....in which case you can get away with it.

///Peter
--
XML FAQ: http://xml.silmaril.ie/

Thanks but you didn't address whether the output statement was what
was intended.

David Schwartz wrote:

Quote: I'm outputing HTML (and Javascript), not XML. cdata-section-elements appears to be appropriate only where method=xml. Perhaps I'm missing something?

Yes, <xsl:output cdata-section-elements="code"/was what I intended.

Some references (including Michael Kay's book, which is one of the best
hardcopy references I've seen for XSLT) do claim that
cdata-section-elements is marked as "not applicable to html output".
However, I've just rechecked and I don't see that restriction in the
XSLT Recommendation itself. All I can say is "try it, and if it doesn't
work ask the processor's authors why not."

But: No program ought to care whether you've used CDATA sections or
individual-character escaping; that distinction is purely a convenience
for humans. Any program which *insists* on one representation or the
other is not processing the documents as intended by their spec. There
are a few special cases where CDATA sections are worth considering --
mostly when the document source is intended to be hand-edited by humans
-- but even there I consider them excessively fragile. So I would also
beat up whoever wrote the code that is foisting this requirement upon you.