"Joseph J. Kesselman" <keshlam-nospam@c...> wrote in message 
news:486a8c19$1@kcnews01...
> rhino wrote:
>> I also tried putting multiple spaces within the <xsl:text> </xsl:text> 
>> block and was surprised that only one space was displayed no matter how 
>> many I put there.
>
> That's not XSLT behavior, but browser behavior. Remember, once you 
> generate the HTML it's processed like any other HTML document. and 
> browsers are free to readjust whitespace as they see fit.
>
> In general, XML tools consider &#32; to be just another way of writing the 
> space character, so it's slightly surprising when you say that change 
> produced different results on screen. I strongly suspect other XSLT 
> processors would handle it differently, so I wouldn't recommend relying on 
> this trick.
>
> The usual HTML solution when you need a specific number of spaces and 
> aren't willing to go all the way to <pre> markup is to use the 
> non-breaking-space character. XSLT doesn't normally know the entity name 
> &nbsp;, but you can specify that character using the numeric character 
> reference &#160;.
>
I wish I'd known _that_ a few hours ago!

I was using &nbsp; in my XSLT and assumed it was perfectly safe because I'd 
used it hundreds of times before in regular HTML. But I kept getting error 
messages to the effect that there was no document. Naturally, I assumed that 
the problem was in the new stuff I was trying, even though it seemed simple 
enough. But nothing I tried in the xsl statements would fix this error 
except removing the entire template or having one that was so simple that 
there was no &nbsp; in it. Finally, I had moderately complicated XSL without 
&nbsp; in it and the code didn't break. Then I added the &nbsp; and nothing 
else and the code broke again. Then I looked up XML entities and saw the 
implication that ONLY the five entities listed in the tutorial were allowed 
and this seemed to confirm that &nbsp; was the culprit because it wasn't in 
the list.

A clearer error message that actually said something like "&nbsp; is not 
permitted in XSLT documents" would have been a LOT more useful than the 
message that did appear. I would have saved several hours that I could have 
used more productively.....

Oh well, live and learn ;-)

Thanks again for your help with this!

--
Rhino