Expressing IT

PROBLEM STATEMENT:
I ran into this a problem regarding textareas in XSLs.  In simple words, the problem arises when you have a blank <textarea> tag, then it will collapse it to <textarea />.
i.e. if you had something like the following in your XSL and the XML data for the TEXTAREA value, returns nothing…

<textarea name=’description’ ><xsl:value-of select=”DESCRIPTION”/></textarea>

As browsers don’t recognise this, it will cause the rest of the form HTML to run into the text area.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:

In the XSL, add a non-breaking-space ( ) after the xsl:value tag.BEWARE, to take care of this extra space you added, during client side validations of this field.

<textarea  name=’description’ ><xsl:value-of select=”DESCRIPTION”/> </textarea>

Or
<xsl:value-of select=”concat (DESCRIPTION,’ ‘)”/>

Or
Insert a <xsl:value-of select=”@unknown” /> tag pointing to an unknown attribute. This will force the PHP XSLT parser to generate an opening and closing text area tag, even if it has nothing in between.

Or
Insert a <xsl:text> field containing a space to force a closing tag.

However, though the above mentioned solutions might seem to fix the problem, I am still not convinced that they are right and best ways to fix it. If there is any other better way of fixing this quirk, Please do let us know.