- From: (unknown charset) Ian Graham <igraham@ic-unix.ic.utoronto.ca>
- Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2000 16:30:04 -0400 (EDT)
- To: (unknown charset) Tantek Çelik <tantek@cs.stanford.edu>
- cc: (unknown charset) Ian Graham <ian.graham@utoronto.ca>, Jan Roland Eriksson <jrexon@newsguy.com>, "www-html@w3.org" <www-html@w3.org>
On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, Tantek [ISO-8859-1] Çelik wrote:
> From: Ian Graham <igraham@smaug.java.utoronto.ca>
> Date: Sun, Apr 9, 2000, 12:31 PM
>
> > On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, Jan Roland Eriksson wrote:
> >
> >> What about "styling" of non existing content?
> >> Leave that no-content element dangling in the DOM tree and we need to
> >> move the decision not to style it to the CSS renderer instead.
> >>
> >> If not, we will not have a way to discourage the use of successive P's
> >> for vertical spacing, and that is what I think David's question was all
> >> about.
> >>
> >
> > If that is the question (it seems a good one), then the problem would
> > appear to be much harder, since what you really want is conditional
> > formatting properties depending on whether 'some' elements contain
> > only ignorable white space (in the XML sense). But HTML is not XML, and I
> > don't think HTML parsers can flag this difference.
>
> There is no such thing as ignorable white space (in any sense, HTML, XML,
> WXYZML, whatever) for a complete CSS1 implementation because you can always
> have rules with white-space:pre:
>
> * {white-space:pre} /* Note: '*' is a commonly implemented CSS-2 selector */
>
Sorry, loose wording in my part. More precisely, I mean the effect of
setting xml:space on an XML application: some applications interpret
xml:space="default" to mean that 'non-significant' white space can be
ignored. For example, the XML processor on IE5 by default converts the
markup
<elem> </elem>
into a DOM element node without text content, since the white space inside
the element is not significant. This can be changed either by setting a
property of the parser object (I've forgotten the name of it), or (I
would expect) by setting xml:space="preserve".
Now I may be wrong, but if the XML is processed into the DOM tree before
formatting is attached to the nodes, then setting a CSS white-space
property wouldn't have any effect, since the text is already gone....
Ian
Received on Sunday, 9 April 2000 18:08:51 UTC