Re: [xml-dev] Non-infoset

[Bob Foster <bob@objfac.com>]

Amelia A Lewis wrote:
> On 2005-04-10 15:25:51 -0400 Alessandro Triglia <sandro@mclink.it> wrote:
>> - the nature and amount of whitespace inside tags;
> 
> What?
> 
> <p>This sentence contains <em>emphasized</em> text.</p>
> 
> Has important characteristics in the whitespace.

Yes, but there isn't anything important about the whitespace within tags:

<p   >These tags contain <em>superfluous</em> whitespace.</p  >

I agree with the rest of your comments.

Even whitespace within tags has its uses, e.g., to break up very long 
lines where adding whitespace outside tags would change the, uh, infoset.

I personally think the distinction comes down to hand-authored XML vs. 
program-generated XML. The latter would mostly be satisifed with 
exchanging infosets. The former, mostly not.

Here are the things human authors _need_ that aren't in the Infoset:

1) A way to include other documents.
2) A way to specify characters that aren't directly supported by the 
author's editor.
3) Comments. Documents are read by other humans, too.
4) Validation. (There's no way one could ever produce a DocBook document 
if there weren't some automatic way to check it.)

I'm kind of amused by Allesandro's harping on the need for a choice of 
attribute value delimiters. Ok, you're about to write a value that 
contains the " character. There are two ways to do it: Delimit the value 
with ' characters (that choice we don't need) or escape the value with 
&quot; (those entities we don't need).

Not a problem for programs, but there are still a few of us humans out 
there, scribbling away.

Bob Foster