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At 1:03 AM +0000 11/25/03, Alaric B Snell wrote:
>Well, a poem as a Unicode string in an ASN.1 encoding will preserve
>whitespace; since whitespace inside a string in an ASN.1 value is
>ALWAYS significant (unlike whitespace in strings in XML, which is
>sometimes used just for indentation of elements and suchlike).
Not true. Conformant XML parsers *always* report all white space in
element content. It is an application level decision whether or not
to consider boundary white space and/or ignorable whitespace to be
significant.
>From what I know of most poetry, typeface is insignificant, but
>whitespace is, yes?
I know at least one modern poet (my wife) in some of whose poetry
type face is significant. I'm not particularly familiar with most
modern poetry, but I suspect she wasn't the first to do this.
Of course white space is significant in some poetry as well, e.e.
cummings being the most famous current example. In most poetry taught
in high school in which, white space is only significant in terms of
word and line breaks. But in many ancient (and a few modern)
languages, white space didn't even exist, but there was still poetry!
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
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