Re: Whitespace outside the document element

At 5:17 PM -0400 6/2/00, John Cowan wrote:
>I would like a clarification on the status of whitespace outside the
>document element in the XPath data model.  Clause 5.1 speaks of
>the children of the root node being an element node and possible
>comment nodes and processing instruction nodes; there is no mention
>of text nodes.
>
>DOM definitely forbids such nodes at both Level 1 and Level 2.
>SAX does not signal an event for such whitespace.  That means that
>if such whitespace is in the model, XPath processors cannot be
>layered directly over either DOM or SAX.

I would certainly favor keeping such whitespace out of the model -- both
for compatibility with other specs like DOM, and because I'd think it very
bizarre if someone wanted to process a document differently based solely on
such whitespace....

Steven_DeRose@Brown.edu; http://www.stg.brown.edu/~sjd