Michael Kay wrote:
Presumably if the recipient can't handle an empty element tag that means
it's expecting HTML rather than XML, so use <xsl:output method="html">.

The OP is using an AJAX call. AJAX usually means that XMLHttpRequest is 
used to receive XML from a server. It is possible to use the text 
content of the response, in which case HTML would suffice. But if the OP 
uses the returned XML as DOM object, the DOM object will be empty or 
null when the the output method on the server is set to HTML.



And if the OP is indeed using the DOM, (s)he can use the DOM to 
manipulate the result. I use AJAX daily and never have any problem with 
minimized tags, because I use the DOM directly and add the DOM to the 
HTML DOM of the page (in which case it doesn't matter at all how the 
element would be serialized).



I am guessing here: if the OP is using, for some reason, the serialized 
version of the response object of XMLHttpRequest, and tries to insert 
that with innerHTML for example, it might give well-known rendering 
problems to have certain tags in minimized form. A workaround is to add 
some content into the DIV, since the content is going to be replaced 
anyway. I.e.:



<div><!-- some comment node --></div>



Cheers,
-- Abel Braaksma