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David Durand wrote: > > I'll be very brief. There's little chance that there will be any new > whitespace ignoring rules in XML. Everyone involved has read (and > written!) literally hundreds of messages on the topic. Inside the XML WG mailing list the WS issue was surely extensively discussed, but I don't have access to the archive of this discussion. I know it's already a favor that the XML draft is made public (all drafts and standards of W3C are public, I think this helps) and that XML WG members are participating in the xml-dev mailing list (they could avoid it). Well, I ask for another favor: could you please make the discussion about WS that led to the WG decision available on line? After such a reading, everybody could become convinced of the appropriate nature of the WG decision. Please! > Every variation > you discussed has been gone over and they all were either: > 1. unworkably complex (like the current SGML rules, whihc few > remember and even fewer remember correctly)). Agreed. > 2. Not compatible with SGML, or unworkably ugly like the proposal to > quote all literal text. If SGML rules concerning WS are to be discarded, any other rule adopted is incompatible, including the draft rule. > 3. Failed to work without a DTD. This is the kicker, and it's > required by XML because you don't always have the DTD, and different > results in the has-DTD/doesn't-have-DTD cases are unacceptable. I agree. The tree structures must be exactly the same in either case. Some constraint regarding WS is necessary on the way to input an XML text I assume. > > The recent change (to normalize all linends) fills the one hole the > previous proposal had -- because it was nearly certain that some > processes would blindly change CRLF and their ilk anyhow. > > My advice: don't waste you're bytes complaining about this -- we've > heard it _all_ before -- and the solution that works best is to leave > it to the application. I am sure I will get convinced when I read the WG discussion :-) Or I fear the WG members will have to hear it all (and more) again :-)) > > Aside: > XML-SPACE doesn't affect this -- it's in the lines of a "standard > hint" that will allow applications like web-crawlers and full-text > indexers to make more sense out of markup according to DTDs about > which they lack special knowledge. So it doesn't contradict the "pass > all space" philosophy, but rather supplements it, to enhance document > re-use. > > -- David > Arnaud xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@i...)
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