RE: [DM] white space

> [Michael Rys] I find inter-word spaces significant (as I do the absence
> of the h in my last name :-)), if there is either explicit indication
> that it should be preserved or it occurs with other words inside the
> same text node. They are not significant if they occur between markup
> tags without anything else.

(I think elsewhere I spelt your first name wrong as well, sorry for both
those), the other Michael could confirm that my typing on xsl-list
isn't always very accurate...

> 
> They are not significant if they occur between markup
> tags without anything else.

I believe there is no precedent (outside some documentation for a
particular company's products) for calling white space textnodes in
mixed content insignificant. This is significant white space in any
conventional xml or sgml usage. Are you really saying you never expect
to see
<a href="foo">this</a> <i>or</i> <a href="bar">this</a>
and you don't care if Xquery/XSLT are so laxly defined that it is
impossible to reliably convert this line with an identity transform to
html?


> 
> [Michael Rys] This goes into the definition of an XML processor. In our
> interpretation the XML processor is the process that generated the
> information set. The data model generation is an application...
 
but according to the infoset doc, the infoset is just an abstraction not
something to generate, really. But as I say you could probably get some
definition like that that would not mean thatyou were contrary to the
XML spec, but it's a close call and doesn't help your unfortunate user
who has all his spaces gone. (This really is a _massive_ problem in IE,
where it makes it virtually impossible to reliably generate _any_ html
from document oriented xml sources (other xhtml, xmlspec, docbook, etc)
its less of a problem in msxml itself as that has a preservewhite space
property that you can set to make it into a more conforming parser, that
reports the space. It is this experience that convinces me that the
current wording, apart from any legalistic issues about undefined terms
is simply catastrophic in terms of usability. If white spaces are
goingto be removed it must not be left up to the parser implementor to
remove them, there must be a user option (somewhere, anywhere) to
preserve them.


David
-- 
http://www.dcarlisle.demon.co.uk/matthew

Received on Monday, 8 December 2003 16:09:23 UTC