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

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

On 12/07/2012 14:18, John P. McCaskey wrote:
>
> <persName>
>      His Excellency
>      <forename>Edward</forename>
>      <surname>Smith</surname>,
>      Shire of <placeName>Westerland</placeName>
> </persName>
>
> Clearly the encoder is expecting that during processing, space will get
> collapsed and leading and trailing space will be trimmed.

Ug normalising mixed content is hard:-) That I think would need to be 
TEI-specific, it isn't even normalising each text node separately as 
you'd get from

<xsl:template match="text()">
<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space()"/>
</xsl:text>

as that would give

<persName>His 
Excellency<forename>Edward</forename><surname>Smith</surname>, Shire 
of<placeName>Westerland</placeName></persName>



Nor is it doing the white space stripping that xsl would do for 
<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/> which would produce


<persName>
      His Excellency
      <forename>Edward</forename><surname>Smith</surname>,
      Shire of <placeName>Westerland</placeName></persName>



So it is yet another choice so seems most natural to be specified at the
TEI processing layer rather than in the document. (HTML has similar
rules about which white space causes white space in the rendering, so if
you replaced persName with div and the other elements with span it would
be normalised as intended, but if you replaced persName with span then
it would not and you'd get an extra space at the start and end.

David



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