Changing the font-size attribute in XHTML tags through XSLT - xhtml

Question

I have some XHTML that looks like this
<span style="font-size:8px;"><font size="3"><strong style="font-size:14pt;">EXAM: </strong>Head</font></span>
And I want to remove all font-size attributes so that it looks like this
<strong>EXAM: </strong>Head
I tried
<xsl:template match="font size">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:copy-of select="#*" />
<xsl:apply-templates select="node()" />
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
But that removes the whole node. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

A template with match="font size" should not be matching anything at all, but the template you show should copy the element it matches and all of that element's attributes, as well as processing all of the element's child nodes. So if the template you show is in fact firing, it should not be removing any nodes at all from the input. I infer that either what you pasted is not an accurate reflection of the code you are running, or else that you are misinterpreting the behavior you're observing.
You say you want to "remove all font-size attributes", which I take to mean all style attributes whose sole function in life is to carry a font-size property. In your sample output, however, you have also removed the span and font elements. I guess the example should be believed.
If I understand the problem correctly, you want a transformation that is mostly an identity transform, but which changes three things.
First you want to suppress style attributes if all they contain is a font-size setting. This is not actually easy to do reliably in the general case without writing a CSS parser in your XSLT, but let's assume you can get by with a simpler test: if a style attribute begins with a font-size setting, it dies.
If you're using a normal identity transform like the one given in the XSLT 1.0 spec, your transform already has a rule to process attributes. We want to override it for this set of style attributes, which we want to suppress entirely. Write:
<xsl:template match="#style[starts-with(.,'font-size')]"/>
Second, you want to suppress span elements which carry style attributes which begin with font-size settings. (Actually, a smarter test might also check for the absence of a 'class' attribute and other things; I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.) Here you don't want to suppress the content, but you don't want the element in the output. So the content of the template is just a call to apply-templates:
<xsl:template match="xh:span
[starts-with(#style,'font-size')]">
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>
Finally, you want to do the same thing with font elements: process their contents, but drop the element itself:
<xsl:template match="xh:font">
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>
An identity transform augmented with these three templates correctly transforms an XHTML document containing your input to a similar XHTML document containing your output but with other things left intact.