Re: Element content the real issue?...

At 12:10 PM 9/30/96 -0400, David G. Durand"  (David G. Durand wrote:
>This same problem occurs for spaces and tabs in element content. My
>original proposal (for SGML) avoids this problem because \n and \r
>characters would be declared as SPACE characters, and thus would be ignored
>in element content. But for XML, we have a problem with any kind of space
>elimination in element content when used with DTD-less processing. It's
>easy to use my approach with SGML, but with XML, there is a real problem
>because without a DTD, we can't tell the difference between element content
>and other content.

According to the proposal:

1. All white space, including RS and RE, immediately following start tags and
   immediately preceding end tags is not significant.

>  So, contra your claim, and my previous assumptions, RE handling is not
>the key issue here.  Whatever we decide on RE processing we will still have
>to deal with element content in a nasty way because of other whitespace
>being treated as data. 

I believe that the proposal handles this in an SGML-compatible way.

 Paul Prescod