Re: SVGT 1.2: A proposal for how to define SVG whitespace in terms of CSS whitespace

* Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>First, let's check what the XHTML 1.1 spec requires for white-space  
>presentation:

Well, it's widely agreed upon that the HTML Working Group really exists
just in some alternate reality; otherwise there is not really a good
reason for why all their specs are written in some crazy moon language.
http://www.mirrorproject.com/show-image.mirror?id=15043 has a recently
discovered photo of their real from the outside. Here in particular:

>"The user agent must use the definition from CSS for processing  
>whitespace characters [CSS2]. Note that the CSS2 recommendation does  
>not explicitly address the issue of whitespace handling in non-Latin  
>character sets. This will be addressed in a future version of CSS, at  
>which time this reference will be updated."

Well, I've no remote idea what this could possibly mean, there's also
a number of normative references that are relevant here, HTML 4 for
example. All these specs have myriads of known issues, I'd rather not
discuss based upon those...

>But of course, a user stylesheet or author stylesheet could override  
>this. And no spec requires visual UAs to include this rule in their  
>UA stylesheet for XHTML or to act as if they do (oddly enough!).

Very odd indeed! Hixie's Terrifying Markup Language 5 might solve one
problem or another here though.

>None of this has anything to do with "xml:space", which has  
>absolutely no effect either on pre or on any other element in major  
>XHTML UAs. White-space presentation for XHTML is entirely controlled  
>by CSS properties, not by xml:space.

Well, you just can't tell the difference, since in order to test this
you'd have to create invalid HTML and the HTML WG violently refuses to
say anything about documents that don't validate to their crazy moon
schemas...

(Follow-ups go to www-archive instead of www-svg...)
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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Received on Tuesday, 31 January 2006 10:43:46 UTC