Re: [xml-dev] What is @xml:space about?

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

John P. McCaskey scripsit:

> But based on XML spec, fifth edition, 2.10 White Space Handling
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#sec-white-space), I think @xml:space is
> for telling an application whether it can proceed with whatever it
> was planning to do with white space inside a text node (such as
> collapsing it as an XSLT app making HTML might) or whether the
> application should preserve the white space found in the node. By
> this understanding, if an application collapsed white space in
> nodes, the white space-only text nodes too would get collapsed, but
> that would be an indirect (and inefficiently reached) result.

I agree with this reading.  The only time that whitespace-only text
nodes are special to XML is when the element containing them is known
(either by a DTD/schema or by hard-coded application knowledge) to have
element-only content.  If the DTD says so, and the parser is a validating
parser, then it is required to mark such whitespace-only text nodes
specially as "ignorable whitespace".  But given the decay of DTDs and
validating parsers, this is not a case that comes up much in practice.
In any case this has nothing to do with xml:space, which is about
the treatment of whitespace anywhere in character content.

-- 
John Cowan       http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        <cowan@ccil.org>
        You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
        You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
                Clear all so!  `Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)