css question

10-13-2004

I'd appreciate any help anyone could provide in this matter.

Please see http://math.wustl.edu/~msh210/rss.xml . There's an <em>
element in there, which should, by my reckoning, show up italicized in my
Web browser (IE6), but doesn't. I assume that I did something wrong
(although problems with IE are, in general, not unheard-of); can someone
please tell me what it is I did wrong?

Some more info (which you can figure out yourself by reading the
documents): rss.xml calls http://math.wustl.edu/~msh210/rss.xsl which, in
turn, has a <link rel="stylesheet"/> element (which my UA uses) and a
<style> element (which my UA does not seem to use: it's the <style>
element that says <em>s should be italicized).

As I say, I'd appreciate any help.

Michael Hamm
AM, Math, Wash. U. St. Louis
Standard disclaimers:
http://math.wustl.edu/~msh210/ ... legal.html

10-13-2004

Hi,

The problem here is the '<xsl:value-of select="description" />': it
returns the concatenation of all text descendants of the 'description
node'. All other nodes like 'em' are ignored.
You could use '<xsl:copy-of select="description" />' to copy all nodes
including 'em'.
(or you could use '<xsl:apply-templates/>')

Also note that you're not generating html.
You don't specify the output type and the generated document itself is not
valid (X)html.
In this case the behaviour of a browser is not defined, so it is not
unlikely to see css rules not being applied.

the stylesheet looks like this

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns

sl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl

utput method="html"/>

<xsl:template match="/">
<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="basic.css" type="text/css" />
<style type="text/css">
em{font-style:italic}
em em{font-style:normal}
em em em{font-style:italic}
strong{font-weight:bolder}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<xsl:apply-templates select="//rss/channel"/>
</body></html>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="channel">

<title><xsl:value-of select="title" /></title>
<h1><xsl:value-of select="title" /></h1>
<p><xsl:value-of select="description" /></p>
<xsl:for-each select="item">
<div>
<h2><xsl:value-of select="title" /></h2>
<address><xsl:value-of select="pubDate" /></address>
<p><xsl:copy-of select="description"/></p>
</div>
</xsl:for-each>
<address><a><xsl:attribute name="href"><xsl:value-of select="link" />
</xsl:attribute><xsl:value-of select="copyright" /></a></address>
</xsl:template></xsl:stylesheet>

regards,

--
Joris Gillis (http://www.ticalc.org/cgi-bin/acct-v...i?userid=38041)
Ceterum censeo XML omnibus esse utendum

10-13-2004

On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 19:14:52 +0000 (UTC),
(Michael Hamm) wrote:

>There's an <em> element in there,

There is indeed. There isn't an <em> in RSS.

I suggest reading this
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200...compatible-rss

10-14-2004

On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 22:45:41 +0100, Andy Dingley <>
wrote, in part:
> > There's an <em> element in there,
>
> There is indeed. There isn't an <em> in RSS.

I didn't refer to any DTD, so there's an anything-I-want in RSS. As long
as I tell the UA what to do (which I thought I did, using CSS), that
should suffice, no?

> I suggest reading this
> http://diveintomark.org/archives/200...compatible-rss

I read it (not very carefully. That is, I read through all the text, but
not all the examples, and none of the external citations). I fail to see
its relevance.

Michael Hamm
AM, Math, Wash. U. St. Louis
Standard disclaimers:
http://math.wustl.edu/~msh210/ ... legal.html

10-14-2004

On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 19:47:26 GMT, Joris Gillis <> wrote, in
part:
> The problem here is the '<xsl:value-of select="description" />': it
> returns the concatenation of all text descendants of the 'description
> node'. All other nodes like 'em' are ignored.
> You could use '<xsl:copy-of select="description" />' to copy all nodes
> including 'em'.

Thanks very much; I've fixed it per your suggestion (this first one that I
quoted), and all seems well.

> Also note that you're not generating html.
> You don't specify the output type and the generated document itself is
> not valid (X)html.
> In this case the behaviour of a browser is not defined, so it is not
> unlikely to see css rules not being applied.

Every browser under the sun knows what to do with a page that looks like
<title>foo</title><h1>bar</h1><p>baz</p>
which is what I generate. The only problem, I guess, is that I don't
specify a MIME type for the generated page. (Browsers faced with
<title>foo</title><h1>bar</h1><p>baz</p>
in a page served with MIME type text/plain will generally not display it
as an HTML page.) So perhaps I'd better, as you suggest, use
> <xsl

utput method="html"/>

Thanks again for your help.

Michael Hamm
AM, Math, Wash. U. St. Louis
Standard disclaimers:
http://math.wustl.edu/~msh210/ ... legal.html

10-14-2004

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 13:17:11 +0000 (UTC),
(Michael Hamm) wrote:

>> There is indeed. There isn't an <em> in RSS.
>
>I didn't refer to any DTD, so there's an anything-I-want in RSS.

No there isn't. There might be, but then it stops being valid RSS.

>As long
>as I tell the UA what to do (which I thought I did, using CSS), that
>should suffice, no?

As Joris has already said, then the "simple" problem was evaluating
<description> as text, not as a node-set.

As a general rule, it's (sadly) not practical to process RSS with pure
XSLT - or at least not to process embedded HTML markup in RSS with it.
Using <xsl:value-of select="description" /> isn't a bad idea really -
it's limited, but it's often the best you can achieve.

>> I suggest reading this
>> http://diveintomark.org/archives/200...compatible-rss

RSS is riven with problems, version incompatibilities and
contradictory specifications. Mny of these are centred on how to
represent embedded HTML markup. The reference is one of the clearest
summaries of this sorry mess.

You can't generate RSS by blindly embedding chunks of literal HTML
into it, as your example did. If you try it, your code will barf when
it receives é or <br> (and a few others). If you're generating
it yourself, then you might be able to limit the content to a balanced
XML fragment (as your example was) which is rather more workable.
This might even work for you, but don't fool yourself that it's valid
RSS, or that other consumers will be happy to accept it.

--
Smert' spamionam

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