Re: White space or whitespace (was Re: Comments for DOM 3 Core Last Call)

At 16:00 2003 08 03 -0700, Susan Lesch wrote:
>If you and the XML Core Working Group have time to consider this for a
>minute and you agree that coining "whitespace" is a good idea, 


While I'm not trying to complicate matters, I'm afraid
there is a larger audience for this issue.  I think it
may be a word in transition from two words to one word
(as often happens in the evolution of languages).

Just a few random examples:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/syndata.html#whitespace
The token S in the grammar above stands for whitespace.

And more ambivalently:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/text.html#propdef-white-space
16.6 Whitespace: the 'white-space' property

XSL copies CSS in this regard, often using the word "whitespace" but
also having properties such as "white-space" and "white-space-collapse"
and "white-space-treatment".  XSL also uses "white space" in prose except
when quoting CSS where it is one word.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/#infoitem.character
* [element content whitespace] A boolean indicating whether 
  the character is white space.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-framework/#scheme
A scheme-based pointer consists of one or more pointer parts, 
optionally separated by white space (S).

http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-0/
 XML 1.0 NMTOKENS attribute type, i.e. a whitespace separated list of NMTOKEN's

 Even though "Amérique Latine" may exist as a single string outside of
 the list, when it is included in the list, the whitespace between Amérique
 and Latine effectively creates a fourth item

 Any well-formed XML belonging to any namespace in the (whitespace separated) list;

 Chapter followed by a single whitespace character (space, tab, newline, etc.),
 followed by a single digit

On the other hand:

 However, a string may contain white space, and white space delimits the items in a list type,

and the facet is called whiteSpace (presumably the uppercase S implies two words).

http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#dc-whiteSpace
The component/facet is whiteSpace (presumably the uppercase S implies two words).

and it talks of "the white space normalization rules".

On the other hand:

Under 2.5.1.2 it says "(where whitespace ·match·es S in [XML 1.0 (Second Edition)])".

and:

  A ·list· datatype can be ·derived· from an ·atomic· datatype whose 
  ·lexical space· allows whitespace

http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n#Example-WhitespaceInContent
talks of "Whitespace in Document Content" and:

 *  Retain all whitespace between consecutive start tags

and

  * Normalization of whitespace in start and end tags

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.1
9.1 White space ....

http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#exprlex
For readability, whitespace may be used in expressions even 
though not explicitly allowed by the grammar:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-datamodel/#flags
Although the data model is able to represent comments, processing 
instructions, and insignificant whitespace,....



paul

Received on Monday, 4 August 2003 11:16:02 UTC