XHTML Transformation Problem

[Paul L Merchant Jr.]

Hi everyone, I'm facing a problem with Xalan Java 2.4.0 and Xerces 2.3.0 and I can't find anything in the archives that addresses this. (Yes, it's the non-breaking space problem all over.)

I'm using Xalan to create a web page from some XML data. My template is essentially an XHTML page in an XSL wrapper with XSL to insert the data into the right places on the page. The template contains some XHTML entities -- non-breaking spaces and some accented characters -- so I've included a DOCTYPE declaration listing the entities so that Xalan is able to parse the template. (It's not practical to change them all to numerical entities given how they are edited and managed.)

This works fine when I use Xerces 2.2, but I recently updated my libraries and found that Xerces 2.3 tries to validate the entire XSL template if it finds a DOCTYPE declaration. This creates a series of messages about undeclared elements, although the transformations still work correctly.

I suspect others have done what I'm trying to do, so before I try to work my way through the code to find out where validation is being enabled does anyone have any advice for how to disable the dynamic validation during XSL parsing? Is there a better way to work around the entity declaration requirement?

Thanks in advance!

Paul Merchant, Jr.
Senior Programmer
Digital Library Technologies Group
Dartmouth College