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Asked: 2026-05-24T00:45:06+00:00

I am trying to transform a .html document using xslt. The generated html for

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I am trying to transform a .html document using xslt. The generated html for some reason has an extra xmlns attribute on the head element, and an empty xmlns attribute on the title element.

example.html:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head><title>foo</title></head>
  <body><h1>bar</h1><img src="baz.jpg" /></body>
</html>

template.xsl:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
     xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

  <xsl:output doctype-system="about:legacy-compat" method="html"
     omit-xml-declaration="yes" />

  <xsl:template match="/html/head">
    <head>
      <meta name="description" content="something added to the head element"/>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="./@*|./node()" />
    </head>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="@*|node()">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

I’ve been testing the transformation with xsltproc and with php.

Running xsltproc:

$ xsltproc -html template.xsl example.html 
<!DOCTYPE html SYSTEM "about:legacy-compat">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta name="description" content="something added to the head element"></meta><title xmlns="">foo</title></head><body>
<h1>bar</h1>
<img src="baz.jpg">
</body>
</html>

Using PHP:

<?php

$xmldoc = new DomDocument ();
$xmldoc->loadHTMLFile ("example.html");

$xsldoc = new DomDocument ();
$xsldoc->load ("template.xsl");

$xslt = new XSLTProcessor();
$xslt->importStylesheet($xsldoc);

echo $xslt->transformToXML ($xmldoc);

I would expect all the elements in the source document to be in the html namespace, so I don’t understand why apply-templates seemingly removes the namespace from the title element. I also don’t understand why the html namespace is added to the head element.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace is for XHTML. Therefore you should set the output mode to xml instead of html and also output the correct doctype for XHTML, or instead render as html and not use any namespace at all.

    Note that XSLT is not quite suited for generating HTML5, but it is perfect for generating HTML 4 or XHTML if you pay some attention to details (such as which elements must or must not be empty etc.).

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