HTML Anchors and XML/XSL

[wdmny]

I am using XML/XSL to handle the formatting of my dynamic data but have ran into a simple problem. Since HTML anchor tags are <a name="NAME"></a>, when processed, it turns the 'empty' tags into the single tag.

<a name="15" />

This would be fine, but the browser handles it as a URL without a href value, and turns the text near it to a link. If I put a non breaking space (&#160 in between the tags, it makes the link where the space is.

What can I put in between the start and closing of the tags to not show up as a link and still be a start and ending tag?

[Andrew-J2000]

hmm, i'm having a similar problem, it strips the content

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme3/an...elop/index.xml

i tried avoiding it by using

<xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="."/>

but that didn't seem to work

[wdmny]

Surely one of our XML gods has a good answer to our simple problem .

Thanks

[MarcusJT]

NOTE: remove the underscores in the code - they are there so that the code isn't rendered by your browser (vB doesn't process the code properly)

Here's a workaround I just came up with (can't track down anything relevant elsewhere on the web):

<a name="testanchor">&_#09;</a>

"&_#09;" is the HTML decimal code for the tab character, which is not rendered by modern graphical browsers (unless in a <PRE> block), so it doesn't show up, and the problem is solved! Note that the "&" character itself will need to be suitably encoded in the XML document with the effect that the line will look like this:

<a name="testanchor">&_amp;#09;</a>

BTW Wes - I don't think names can be prefixed with a number (or simply be a number) like in the example you gave. Although that's not the cause of this particular problem, it's something to avoid (although I suspect that it was just the first thing that came into your head when you bashed out that anchor as an example).


M@rco

[wdmny]

Thanks M@rco, that did the trick. Also, I did just throw in that anchor name. Now that you mention it, I think I ran into that problem before and ended up placing a letter in front of the number.

Thanks