Eric,
I think it's important to distinguish between server behavior and
browser behavior. While we can use XQuery to generate valid XHTML on the
server, the browser may decide to interpret it as quirky HTML tag-soup.
This is commonly known as "quirks mode" (vs "standards compliance mode"
- apologies if you already know all this), and Mozilla-family browsers
will tell you which mode was used for the current page (on Firefox 3,
Tools > Page Info).
In my experience, it's best to avoid quirks mode by persuading the
browser to render in standards-compliance mode: that is, tell the
browser to expect XHTML. When I combine the XHTML doctype with the xhtml
namespace, I find that I don't need any special tricks with <textarea/>
elements. Here's an example:
xquery version "1.0";
declare variable $ACCEPT-XML as xs:boolean :=
(: Opera says that it accepts xhtml+xml, but does not. :)
contains(xdmp:get-request-header('accept'), 'application/xhtml+xml')
and not(contains(xdmp:get-request-header('user-agent'), 'Opera'))
;
xdmp:set-response-content-type( concat(
if ($ACCEPT-XML) then "application/xhtml+xml" else "text/html",
"; charset=utf-8") ),
'<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">',
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";>
<head>
<title>test</title>
</head>
<body>
<textarea></textarea>
</body>
</html>
Some of the above code was lifted from cq/lib-controller.xqy - cq is
itself a moderately complex XQuery + XHTML + JavaScript application, and
while its code isn't always as clean as I might like, it hopefully
provides some useful examples. All of the cq source code is open under
the Apache license.
-- Mike
Eric Palmitesta wrote:
Aaron and I discussed this briefly at the training seminar, but I'd like
to get a sense of what other developers are doing to get around the
quirks of generating xhtml with xquery (rather than a java servlet/jsp
based website which pulls records from MarkLogic via XDBC/XCC.
One such quirk: Childless elements with no internal nodes and an
explicit closing tag are automatically folded into elements with no
closing tag. <div></div>, which is valid xhtml, will become <div />
after being processed by MarkLogic (breaks visual representation). Some
better examples are <script ...></script> and <textarea></textarea>,
which are expected to contain no internal nodes in xhtml.
I've taken to writing things like
<script ... >{" "}</script>
or
<textarea> </textarea>
which successfully preserves the explicit closing tag, keeping xhtml
happy. Is there a more elegant way to do this?
Are there other banana-peels I should watch out for when generating
xhtml with xquery? Is creating an entire website by generating xhtml
with xquery generally frowned upon, or accepted? Admittedly, it seems
less flexible than a <web language>-based site, however the xdmp
namespace seems to provide sufficient functionality, and transforming
xml data into xhtml is incredibly easy with xquery.
Cheers,
Eric
PS
My vocabulary might be incorrect regarding words like 'tag' and 'node',
please correct me if necessary.
PPS
I can see the archives at http://xqzone.marklogic.com/pipermail/general/
but are they searchable? I have a feeling newcomers such as myself will
be prone to asking questions which have already been discussed at length.
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