Setting the DOCTYPE in XSL

August 2nd, 2008 by Nikhil

Last week I created a progessive HTML/CSS layout for a client, tested it in IE6, IE7 and FF 3, seemed perfectly fine… UNTIL! the layout went further down the manufacting cycle. It failed. Page layout elements just went all over the place when the HTML layout was converted into  XSL and  XML applied to it … Bummer!!!

Could not sleep ok over the weekend, in anticipation of Monday morning, when I’ll have to fix this SH**. But now having a little experince in dealing with these kind of situations ( Browser Quirks, I mean), I knew it had to do with nothing else but DOCTYPE…. and It WAS…

The Problem:
You want control over the DOCTYPE, since your transformation will include a default DOCTYPE explicitly, and you layout will be out for a toss.

The Solution:
XSLT specs provides output methods to set a the DOCTYPE of choise. Also, for us UI developers, the topics of interest would be HTML output methods and XML output methods.

Well! before you get bored , here is the fix.

For eg., if you had the following DOCTYPE in your HTML version :-

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Then in the XSL you would have to have the following :-

<xsl:output method="html" doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd" doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" indent="yes" />

and Finally! do make sure your XSLT output obeys the DOCTYPE  you have chosen.

Tags: , , ,


get ExpressingIT News by Email Subscribe to ExpressingIT by Email |  Follow Me on Twitter


One Response to “Setting the DOCTYPE in XSL”

  1. Expressing IT » Blog Archive » Mis-behaving IE8 : CSS Layout breakages (Targeting a browser version using Meta Tags in IE8) Says:

    […] What are DOCTYPES? What are BROWSER QUIRKS & STRICT Mode? […]


Leave a Reply

 Subscribe to ExpressingIT RSS
get ExpressingIT News by Email Subscribe to ExpressingIT by Email
 Follow Me on Twitter