RE deleta est

During the ERB meeting of 5 June 1997, the ERB voted unanimously to
change the rules for white-space handling in section 2.8.  Present:
Bosak, Bray, Clark, Connolly, DeRose, Hollander, Magliery, Maler,
Paoli, Sperberg-McQueen, Wood; absent:  Kimber.

In particular, the paragraph

  An XML processor which does not read the DTD must always pass
  all characters in a document that are not markup through to the
  application.  An XML processor which does read the DTD must always
  pass all characters in mixed content through to the application.
  It may also choose to pass white space occurring in element content
  to the application; if it does so, it must signal to the
application
  that the white space in question is not significant.

will be changed more or less as follows:

  An XML processor must always pass all characters in a document
  that are not markup through to the application.  An XML processor
  which reads the DTD must distinguish white space in element content
  from other non-markup characters, and signal to the application
  that white space in element content is not significant.

Rationale:  eliminating the optional behavior of suppressing white
space in element content eliminates the potential inconsistency among
XML processors in the counting of pseudo-elements (this topic came up
as a digression from the discussion of pseudo-element counting for
CHILD, NEXT, PREV, etc.).  Since the Technical Corrigendum to 8879
will provide a KEEPALL keyword for the SGML declaration which will
specify that all white space should be passed to the application, the
exception for element content is no longer necessary for the sake of
compatibility with 8879.  Downside:  the new rule does mean that
existing SGML parsers will need to be modified to retain all white
space (e.g. using a run-time switch), but the parser makers in the
group considered this to be a relatively simple surgery to perform on
existing code.

That afternoon, when this was announced at the joint conference of
the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association
for Literary and Linguistic Computing, David Durand was crowned with
a victor's wreath.  At least, he would have been if Kingston,
Ontario, had had any olive trees.  He settled for a paper crown
instead.

Other decisions bearing not on XML-lang but on XML-link will be
reported separately.

-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen

Received on Tuesday, 10 June 1997 20:00:39 UTC