Stephan Hoffmann wrote:


> I use XML mainly as a source for HTML. HTML browsers 'know'
> certain entity references like é or ä.
> 
> When I use XSL to transform XML to HTML or XML, these entities are replaced
> by what they refer to. 
> 
> Is there a way to avoid that? 

XSLT/XPath 1.0 at least which is the current version and the one 
implemented by lots of processors and in wide-spread use does not 
provide anything in its data model or in its instructions to create 
entity references and to ensure that these are preserved and not 
replaced by the entity content when the result of a transformation is 
serialized.
You would need to look at a specific XSLT processor and check whether it 
provides any mechanisms outside the standards to deal with entity and 
entity references.
Saxon 6 has an extension function documented here:
<http://saxon.sourceforge.net/saxon6.5.4/extensions.html#saxon:entity-ref>

> Two reasons to avoid that:
> - On my linux machine xsltproc replaced the entities in a way that
> my browser did not correctly display the resulting HTML
> (I updated my linux distribution and it now works).
> 
> - &lt; is replaced by < and the output is no longer valid XML/HTML

But &lt; and &gt; are references to entities predefined in XML and 
certainly if any application supposed to output XML or HTML outputs &lt; 
as a plain '<' character then the application is seriously broken.
This is a different issue, those characters '<' and '>' are obviously 
special as they delimit tags in both XML and HTML and therefore need to 
be escaped as &lt; respectively &gt;.
&auml; in HTML 4 stands for the character 'ä' and that has no special 
meaning in XML or HTML so if an XSLT processor or other application 
supposed to output XML or HTML simply inserts 'ä' instead of &auml; in a 
document properly encoded and with the proper encoding used and declared 
then there are no problems with well-formedness (or even validity).



-- 

	Martin Honnen
	http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/