[Bug 4315] Whitespace stripping for attributes of type character

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=4315

           Summary: Whitespace stripping for attributes of type character
           Product: XPath / XQuery / XSLT
           Version: Recommendation
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: XSLT 2.0
        AssignedTo: mike@saxonica.com
        ReportedBy: zongaro@ca.ibm.com
         QAContact: public-qt-comments@w3.org


The third item in the first bulleted list of section 2.2 of the XSLT 2.0
Recommendation states, "In all cases where this specification states that the
value of an attribute must be one of a limited set of values, leading and
trailing whitespace in the attribute value is ignored."

It's not entirely clear what the phrase "limited set" was intended to mean. 
Does it mean "finite set" or does it mean something like "a proper subset of
the possible values an attribute might have?"  I am guessing that it was
intended to mean the latter, and a clarification might be in order.

With either definition though attributes whose values are specified to be a
char are problematic.  If the value specified in an input document is a single
whitespace character, the rule I've quoted above requires leading and trailing
whitespace to be ignored, which would result in a zero-length string.

I would suggest something like the following rewording:  "In all cases where
this specification states that the value of an attribute MUST be anything other
than <em>string</em> or <em>char</em>, leading and trailing whitespace in the
attribute value is ignored."

Received on Friday, 9 February 2007 19:43:42 UTC