Re: Current Status of Discussion on RE/RS Handling

[Jon Bosak]

> An implication of the ERB's current RE/RS proposal just posted by
> Eliot is that extra spaces within the text of a paragraph (for
> example) would not be collapsed by this rule (though of course they
> could be by the application).  So people who have gotten into the
> habit of prettying up their source by indenting text (for example)
> will have to unlearn this habit if the receiving app isn't set up to
> collapse the extra spaces.
> 
> Personally (speaking now only as the five-line perl hacker and
> someone who has to teach this stuff in two-day extension courses),
> this is fine with me because it's so incredibly easy to explain: you
> want spaces, put 'em in; you don't want spaces, leave 'em out.  But
> I thought that this aspect should be made explicit.

This is another thing that becomes moot if whitespace normalization is
an application convention instead of a parser rule.  For non-verbatim
elements, spaces can be normalized (in the grove of a DSSSL engine, or
before rendering in a simpler browser), and they can be preserved in
verbatim elements.  I think it simplifies a lot to define it this way,
but I'd love to hear counterarguments.

-Chris
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Received on Thursday, 26 September 1996 19:13:38 UTC