Transforming XHTML to HTML

Question

Hi all!
Here's the deal: I'm trying to transform an XHTML document to HTML using XSLT and the Tranformers in the JAXP. So far, I can get documents that are entirely text (w/ no HTML tags at all) or documents that have tags but no text! Basically, all I need to do is strip the xml declaration from the top of the document and replace
tags with <br> tags (get rid of the trailing slash). Any suggestions on the correct XSL templates to use? Is there a simpler way of doing this than using XSLT?
Regards,
V.

Answer 1

You basically want to do an identity transform (outputs what was input), but specify that you want the output formatted as html. I did a quick search for identity stylesheet and this is what I found (untested):
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";>
<xsl:template match="node()|@*">
     <xsl:copy>
          <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
     </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
My xsl skills are fuzzy, so we'll just assume it works and let you test it. You also want to include the following rule, which generates html style tags and leaves out the xml declaration:
<xsl:output method="html"/>
As to whether this is the easiest way to do what you want, I really don't know. Maybe DOM or JDom have an output writer which can use html style, or maybe it's not that difficult to write your own.