RE: [xml-dev] Handling of significant whitespace in .NET XmlReade r

["Derek Denny-Brown" <derekdb@microsoft.com>]

I generally agree with your comments regarding the confusion that
resulted from our implementation choice.  It was very hard to judge
where the Xml user community would go back then (that decision is now
over 4 yrs old..)  The worst part, is that with a large company, you
can't change defaults like this.  You pray you make a good decision the
first time through, because you are stuck with it.  If we changed the
default for XSLT in IE, our support people would be _very_ unhappy.
They would be fielding a deluge of complaints from corporate customers
whose internal web-sites now didn't display like they used to, etc.. Not
a showstopper, but I don't think we could get a change like that past
the OS compatibility people.

I am confused though.  We don't completely strip the whitespace, despite
the fact that there is no evidence of it on the DOM.  Xslt should still
be acting like there was a single space there, or at least that was my
understanding.  Can you give me an example where this is a problem?

-derek

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Carlisle [mailto:davidc@nag.co.uk]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2003 10:14 AM
> To: Derek Denny-Brown
> Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Handling of significant whitespace in .NET
XmlReade
> r
> 
> 
> 
> > Oddly enough, Despite the fact that this behaviour deviates from
what
> > XML/DOM recommends, I have had many users actually _thank_ us for
> > behaving this way.
> 
> I can believe that it optimises many uses of XML where white space is
> merely indentation so I don't object too much to it in msxml (although
> the fact that white space stripping is on by default in msxml is just
> about the number one source of incompatibility between XSLT systems.
> 
> When on xsl-list a user says position() returns 1,2,3 on one system
> and 2,4,6 on another, You can always reliably reply that the first
> system is MSXML, and it's thrown away white space, and every other
XSLT
> system will count it. Looking from an xsl-list perspective I'd say it
> has caused far more confusion than any optimisation was worth.
> 
> But for IE, which is primarily a document browser, white space
stripping
> by default is just simply awful. White spaces in documents tend to be
> between words. So even though I would expect that msxml itself won't
> change, I strongly believe that IE should use msxml with
> preservewhitespace set true. You'll _have_ to do that anyway if you
> ever want to support XHTML (or let anyone else support XHTML via a
> stylesheet).
> 
> 
> 
> David
> 
>
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