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

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

On 10/07/2012 16:00, Michael Kay wrote:
> xml:space="preserve" says that the author of the document believes all 
> white space to be significant; xml:space="preserve" says that the 
> recipient can do whatever he likes.
The second one, of course, should have been xml:space="default" - MK

> I don't know of any applications that use this attribute for any 
> purpose other than to decide whether whitespace-only text nodes should 
> be preserved, but one could certainly argue that an XSLT stylesheet 
> author who does normalize-space() on an element with 
> xml:space="preserve" is ignoring the document author's intentions 
> (which, of course, he is perfectly entitled to do).
>
> Michael Kay
> Saxonica
>
>
> On 10/07/2012 14:06, John P. McCaskey wrote:
>> What is @xml:space about?
>>
>> Jesper Tverskov (at http://www.xmlplease.com/xml/xmlspace/) and 
>> Dimitre Novatchev (at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11372222) 
>> say that @xml:space is, like <xsl:strip-space>, only about what to do 
>> with whitespace-only text nodes. Dimitre suggests that the spec might 
>> be ambiguous but that all implementations he knows read it as he does.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Does @xml:space refer only to treatment of white space-only text 
>> nodes or to treatment of all text nodes?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> John
>>
>>
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>
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