Stripping whitespace from text nodes

I know there has been discussion on whitespace handling in SVG on this 
list, and that the definition of whitespace handling has been shown to 
be unclear in some respects 
[http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2007Jul/0037.html], but I 
am having difficulty with even the simplest case shown in the SVG 1.1 
specification.

The SVG 1.1 definition of whitepsace handling 
[http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/text.html#WhiteSpace] (in the default case, 
when xml:space='default' is assumed) says that all leading and trailing 
whitespace should be removed from a text element's character data (which 
I assume to mean any child text node of an svg:text element).

However, the 'tspan01' example 
[http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/text.html#TSpanElement] shows the trailing 
space in the text node before the svg:tspan and the leading space in the 
text node after the svg:tspan have not been removed.

The definition [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile12/text.html#WhiteSpace] 
and example (now called 10_03.svg) 
[http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile12/text.html#TSpanElement] are similar in 
the SVG Tiny 1.2 CR.

Am I misunderstanding the existing definition of whitespace handling? Or 
should the definition be more explicit, for example instead of "Then it 
will strip off all leading and trailing space characters" it might say 
"Then it will strip off all leading space characters from the first text 
node and all trailing space characters from the last text node of the 
body of a text element".

Roger Gimson


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