I have been working on the MyEPICS 2.0 framework for creating a website to match roommates together. During this time, I was switching from the old layout, to a different look and feel. When the designing and implementing the MyEPICS framework, I tried to make it as modular as possible, and able to switch layouts easily.
The only big problem that I ran across was empty div tags. The author of the article does a good job of explaining exactly what happened, but doesn’t offer a solution. He may have lost 2 hours of his life finding the problem, but I lost 2 hours of my life attempting to find a solution. My solution was to add an <xsl:output> tag to my XSLT sheet, with a method of ‘html’, which then properly fixed the problem. No more were empty div tags consuming whatever was after them, and it adds a DOCTYPE declaration, which is a big bonus! Now the output passes xhtml strict.