>Is there a way to disable this formatting? I want it to be the same >as the way I specified it.
The XML data model does not recognize any difference between <a></a> and <a/>, so we have no way of knowing how you specified it originally. It might be nice if there was a way to hint to the serializer that all instances of a specific kind of element should be written out with a separate end-tag even when empty. XSLT doesn't currently have a standard mechanism for doing so, and I'm not sure it actually permits it in a compliant processor. I suppose we could add a Xalan-specific option to request this behavior... though of course if you ran the same stylesheet elsewhere you'd get different results, which may not be what you want. It's probably worth posting this into Bugzilla with Severity=Enhancement to remind us to think about it when we have time to do so. A least-impact, though less efficient, alternative would be to write a separate postprocessor which finds the relevant shorthand <empty/> elements and expands them into separate start/end tags.
