- From: Joe English <jenglish@crl.com>
- Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 12:23:10 -0700
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
Robert Streich <streich@slb.com> wrote: > [...] > Even the whitespace in element content wouldn't cause the > application any problems. It's just going to ignore any extra whitespace > anyway unless the stylesheet tells it that it is significant. > > Even Joe's example [below] > isn't significant. The stylesheet will determine whether or not <b> starts > a new line. I think you're correct that _most_ applications will be able to treat all syntactic whitespace the same -- browsers and indexers for instance -- but there may be some circumstances where the distinction between SEPCHARs in element and mixed content is still important. One of the potential advantages of XML over HTML is the ability to create hyperlinks to any part of any document with HyTime or HyTime-like locators. (I suppose this is also possible in theory for HTML, but since the vast majority of Web pages are not valid SGML it wouldn't be very useful unless all parsers had identical error-recovery strategies.) For this to work, it's essential that all XML parsers can construct equivalent groves. For instance, in: > <a> > <b>blah</b> > <b>blah</b> > </a> the tree location address of the second 'B' element can change depending on whether 'A' has mixed content or element content. Then again, this might not be an issue either. TEI-style 'XPTR's could be used instead, and they wouldn't break. --Joe English jenglish@crl.com
Received on Tuesday, 24 September 1996 15:22:56 UTC