Re: SPACE...

At 06:39 AM 11/8/96 CST, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:

>I18nists, speak up now.  Reduce them all or not?  In favor:  it's
>simple behavior, it is easily understood, and all white space is
>treated the same.  Against:  well, I don't know whether there is any
>argument against, that's what I am asking:  *is* there an argument
>against?  Is the distinction between SPACE, half-width space,
>en-space, em-space, double-width space, zenkaku space, etc., to be
>preserved in a way that the distinction between SPACE and TAB is not
>preserved?  Should some white space characters be leveled and others
>not?  We were not planning to level NBSP, since one common use
>for it is to try to prevent such white-space normalization in
>specific cases; should other 10646 white-space characters also be
>exempt?  Which?

I'm not sure about the "its easily understood" statement. 0646 row 20 has a
group of 12 "spaces", two of which are em-quad and en-quad and the rest are
named as spaces, including something known as a punctuation space. I suspect
that if we don't treat em-quad and en-quad as spaces, but treat the rest of
them as such we will be OK but I'm not convinced. Personally I think of
space of a defined width as being different from a separator, and what we
are talking about here is the use of spaces as separators in markup rather
than separators in data. I can't really see people entering
four-per-em-spaces in an attribute value, though I can see them trying to
enter a zenkaku space in a Japanese attribute value

Martin Bryan.
----
Martin Bryan, The SGML Centre, Churchdown, Glos. GL3 2PU, UK 
Phone/Fax: +44 1452 714029   WWW home page: http://www.u-net.com/~sgml/

Received on Friday, 8 November 1996 11:00:07 UTC