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- From: Paul Prescod <papresco@technologist.com>
- To: XML Dev <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
- Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 13:45:22 -0400 (EDT)
On Mon, 22 Jun 1998, John Cowan wrote:
> I think that the notion of "insignificant" whitespace is a sop, partly
> to SGML, partly to people (like me, I admit) who want to pretty-print
> XML, and partly to element-blind processes that want to be able to
> ignore pretty-printing without having to know what they are doing.
>
> Processes that attach semantics to particular elements will know
> whether or not to ignore whitespace, because they will expect either
> element content or mixed content for each container element.
This will often work in practice. I consider it extremely distasteful to
have an application actually decide not just what data *means* but what
really *is* data and what is just markup convenience. Encoding pretty
printing as meaningful data in the hopes that the processing code will
correctly guess which is which is sloppy and will probably be error
prone. AFAIK, there is no perfect solution, and what we have is no more
broken than most of the other potential solutions we had available. It is,
nevertheless, broken.
Paul Prescod
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