Whitespace around enumerated attribute values

The MatmML 3.0 draft says:
"When MathML applications process attribute values, whitespace is  
ignored except to separate letter and digit sequences into individual  
words or numbers."

This doesn't appear to match implementation in Firefox 2.0. For  
example, movablelimits="false" and
movablelimits="    false    " are not treated in the same way.

This problem is not unique to MathML. With HTML and SVG putting  
whitespace around enumerated values causes interop problems. (<input  
type='  radio'> and <input type='radio'> are different in Firefox and  
fill-rule="   evenodd   " and fill-rule="evenodd" are different in  
Opera.)

It follows that robustness authors are best off always omitting extra  
whitespace in attribute values. I suggest this be required for  
document conformance for this reason.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Tuesday, 18 December 2007 19:01:16 UTC