Special Edition Using XSLT

Dealing with HTML Elements That Are Not Well Formed

The difference between this and the style sheets you have encountered so far is in the <xsl:output method="html"> element. When instructed to output HTML, an XSLT engine will allow the outputting of HTML that is not well-formed XML, such as <IMG> tags.

The most important difference between HTML output and XML output is that empty elements do not have closing tags. In XML, an <img> element might be written like this:

<img src=”foo.gif” /> 

or

<img src=”foo.gif”></img> 

Whereas in HTML mode, the following is output:

<img src=”foo.gif”> 

The elements <AREA>, <BASE>, <BASEFONT>, <BR>, <COL>, <HR>, <IMG>, <ISINDEX>, <LINK>, <META>, and <PARAM> are empty in HTML 4.0. Because HTML is not case sensitive, ...