I suspect this is an old question answered elsewhere but I can't seem to find a
complete description of best practices for handling empty HTML elements. Say
I'm outputting some text content from an XML document to the browser.
Typically, I'll wrap that content in a div or some other HTML element.
e.g.
<div>{$content}</div>
If, however, it happens that the value of $content is empty, then the following
is sent to my browser
<div />
which it interprets as an open div and my HTML formatting gets messed up.
I understand that if the div is associated with the xhtml namespace
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
ML will send back the following instead:
<div></div>
which the browser can handle.
I also understand that I can declare a default element namespace of
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml, but if the content I'm working with does not
declare its own namespace, then it inherits this default namespace and can
create problems when working with that content.
I can use a hack to ensure that there is always something between the div
elements (e.g. <div>{$content} </div>) or test that the value of $content
is not empty before outputting the div, but that is too easy to forget to do
and all those checks and placeholder values make the code look messy.
I know I can also associate the xhtml namespace with a specific prefix and use
that with all my HTML elements (e.g. <h:div>{$content}</h:div> ), but it is too
easy to forget to do this for every element.
Is there a better way to handle this? It must be a common issue so I'm
guessing there is a better approach than the options I've been able to figure
out.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Alan
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