10.5 Dummy blocks

Finally, STL defines two XML elements, stl:block and stl:inline, which will be committed when processing the template.

They are useful when we want to apply the stl:if or stl:repeat attributes to a block of XML that does not match an XML element. For example we may rewrite the snippet from the previous section this way:

    <stl:block repeat="task tasks">
      <h4>${task/title}</h4>
      <p>${task/description}</p>
    </stl:block>

To get this output:

    <h4>Finish the Documentation</h4>
    <p>Documentation is very important</p>

    <h4>Release 1.0</h4>
    <p>And rejoice</p>

The difference between the two elements is that stl:block is a block element while stl:inline is an inline element (see the HTML documentation to learn what this means exactly¹).

The reason we make this difference is because it has an impact on the localization of the templates.

Footnotes

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.5.3