XSL companion, The

Breaking well-formed constraints

By default, the XSLT processor must output a well-formed XML document. This is not a serious constraint, but in fact the reality is that the stylesheet itself, including the mixture of XSLT elements and output elements, must be well-formed too. This is a more serious problem. For example, a list of alternating names and telephone numbers may need to be converted into a number of paragraphs, each containing a name and following number:

<name>J Smith</name>
<number>123</number>
<name>P Jones</name>
<number>321</number>

The obvious way to do this is to output a new Paragraph element at the start of each name and end the paragraph after the following number, but this would make the stylesheet itself invalid because ...