Re: RS/RE, again (sorry)

At 03:17 PM 12/12/96 -0600, streich@austin.sar.slb.com wrote:
>I would hope that anytime you write a DSSSL stylesheet, you wouldn't make
>any assumptions about what an SGML parser would do with white-space. If you
>do, you still have more faith in software than I do. Call me paranoid, but
>I would always build in rules for collapsing white-space where I didn't
>want. I'd rather be safe than sorry.

In *element* content? I have never written a stylesheet that explicitly
removed whitespace between list items, for instance, or between titles and
paragraphs, or between paragraphs or between bibliography items, or...

egad...am I misunderstanding or are we talking about a *massive* DSSSL script? 

According to my reading of the DSSSL spec, the standard behaviour for
#PCDATA is to pass the characters on to the output. That means you must
explicitly blow them away, unless, as Lee says, we do some special
interaction between XML and DSSSL-O, or there is some way to turn them off
globally. Uck.

As I mentioned before, it would be better off leaving out whitespace between
elements. We can't have *both* all whitespace significant *and* reliable
whitespace removal for pretty printing.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Thursday, 12 December 1996 16:38:15 UTC