Re: [xml-dev] Use tabs rather than a series of (wasteful) spaces

I am wondering why people should even spend time discussing such minor lexical details ?!? ...

No matter how indented or not a document is, and what whitespace characters were used, most editing tools can format it to a well indented form.

Why should we care about this?

Thanks,

Dimitre

P.S. Why worry about the size of the whitespace if any HTTP 1+ response by default is gzipped? Probably the only time the (compressed) size matters is when sending the document over the network.

On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 11:38 AM Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> wrote:

Hi Folks,

Consider this XML document

<Document>
<Greeting>Hello, world</Greeting>
</Document>

There is a single newline character following <Document>
There is a single tab character preceding <Greeting>

By using the tab character, the XML document is only 48 characters.

If I had used the equivalent number of spaces to indent, the XML document would be larger, 55 characters.

By using tabs consistently throughout my XML documents, I gain three benefits:

1. The XML is in a standardized form, which makes it easier to write programs that talk and work together.
2. The XML documents are smaller, as they have no wasteful embedded blanks.
3. Typing is faster.

You might object, "What if I feed the XML document into, say, a printer device that doesn't allow tabs?" Answer: simply write a detab tool that converts tabs to spaces.

Note that many tools automatically detab text files. For example, the "more" tool automatically detabs.

more document.xml | printer-device

Comments?

/Roger

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Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev

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