xalan ignores xsl:output method="html"?

[Christos Karras]

I have a stylesheet with <textarea> and <div> tags, when they are empty,
xalan outputs <textarea/> and <div/> instead
of <textarea></textarea> and <div></div>, which Internet Explorer
doesn't correctly interpret.

There's <xsl:output method="html"/> in my stylesheet, but it doesn't
seem to change the output. Is it because xalan
doesn't know about IE's bug on <textarea/> and <div/>, so it thinks it
can safely output that? Or could it be something
wrong in my transformation process, which makes it unable to output
HTML?

I use Xalan-Java 2.2 to transform an XML string built by a servlet to
HTML, which is output directly to the response's Writer using a
StreamResult

The XML string is read using a StreamSource wrapped on a StringReader:
Source xmlSource = new StreamSource(new StringReader(strXML))

Then, a Transformer objet is created and I call its transform() method,
using a StreamResult to send the HTML output to the client
Transformer transformer = template.newTransformer();
Writer out = response.getWriter();
transformer.transform(xmlSource, new StreamResult(out));