Re: whitespace normalization passed to application?

Neil Bradley <neil.bradley@detica.com> writes:

> I read somewhere that normalization settings for element content and
> attribute values is NOT passed-on to an application, but only used to help
> avoid errors when checking against a data type that does not allow for
> whitespace. Yet the XML standard talks about whitespace normalization for
> attributes being passed on to an application. When no validation takes
> place, or when the type is CDATA, we get one form of normalization, and when
> validating and the attribute type is something else we get further
> normalization. 
>
> So, if I validate against a schema instead of a DTD, does an application
> get:
> 1) no normalization of attribute values at all
> 2) default (CDATA type) normalization of all attributes
> 3) different kinds of normalization, depending upon the data type used

(2) and (3).  The vanilla infoset property [normalized value] will
have CDATA-normalized content (in the absence of a DTD, all conformant
XML processors should do this).  The PSVI property [schema normalized
value] will have content normalized per the whitespace facet of the
validating simple type definition (or be absent, if the data wasn't
valid).

How any particular processor makes this information _available_ is
another question.

ht
-- 
  Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
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Received on Tuesday, 26 August 2003 10:03:30 UTC