Xml content did not recognized by template - xslt

Question

I have xml with a tag which contains an attribute with a html content in it. I need to convert this html to xsl-fo . Here is my xslt code:
<xsl:template match ="rtf">
<fo:block-container>
<fo:block>
<xsl:call-template name ="ConvertHtmlToXslfo">
<xsl:with-param name ="content">
<xsl:value-of select ="#rtfAsHtml" disable-output-escaping ="yes"/>
</xsl:with-param>
</xsl:call-template>
</fo:block>
</fo:block-container>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template name="ConvertHtmlToXslfo">
<xsl:param name ="content"></xsl:param>
<fo:block-container>
<xsl:apply-templates select="msxsl:node-set($content)"/> <!--here is the problem-->
</fo:block-container>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match ="div">
<fo:block-container>
<!--more code here-->
</fo:block-container>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match ="p">
<fo:block>
<!--more code here-->
</fo:block>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match ="span">
<fo:inline>
<!--more code here-->
</fo:inline>
</xsl:template>
But there is a problem, when in call apply-templates on this html content. the relevant templates doesn't recognize it.
Here is the xml Tag with Html attribute in it:
<rtf rtfAsHtml="<div ><p ><span>Hi!</span></p></div>"/>
Any idea how to convert this Html tag to xsl-fo ?
thank you!

Answer 1

The problem is that your xml/html content is escaped. You try to apply disable-output-escaping, but that only works upon writing to output file or stream. So, you are effectively just submitting the unescaped attribute contents against your templates, which doesn't do much indeed.
Not sure what kind of XSLT parser you are using, but if you use Saxon, you could try to apply saxon:parse:
http://saxonica.com/documentation9.4-demo/html/extensions/functions/parse.html
This does require the contents of the attribute to be well-formed. If not, you could try:
http://saxonica.com/documentation9.4-demo/html/extensions/functions/parse-html.html
HTH!