[Exist-open] How to render empty tags not as self-closing tags?

[Christian A. <chr...@ge...>]

Dear community,

I have a problem with an XQuery script that calls an XSLT script to 
convert some XML from the eXist database to HTML.

E.g. this XML

<lb/>

gets converted to this HTML

<span class="br" data-lineNum="6"/>

which is a self-closing <span /> tag. But <span> is not allowed to be a 
self-closing tag <span ... /> in HTML. Instead it should be <span 
...></span> with no content, but the attributes as above.

I tried several things. The XSLT is called from within an XQuery script, 
so I declared in this XQuery file:

declare option exist:serialize "method=xhtml 
media-type=application/xhtml+html";

But still I get self-closing <span />-tags.

How can I force the HTML part to be like this:

<span class="br" data-lineNum="6"></span>

??

Thanks in advance and let me know if more information is needed.

Kind regards
Christian