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Thanks Michael Sperberg-McQueen for sharing that bit of XML/ERB history. Digging a bit deeper into old posts to this very mailing list, I found that various whitespace issues were discussed at great length in http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/199708/threads.html . However, these seem to be about whitespace in content rather than attribute specifications, and in particular about a replacement for SGML's traditional newline (RE/RS) handling rules consistent with XML's DTD-lessness/-neutrality (remember traditional SGML considers whitespace around start-/end-tag elements as non-significant "layout" if appearing all on a line of it's own, for declared elements ie not those included via content exceptions). And also, in fact convenience for line-oriented Unix tools and Perl was hotly debated. Other than that, the earliest mention of the issue on this mailing list appears to be in http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/199703/msg00083.html where the relevant BNF grammar rule reads Markup ::= '<' Name (S Name Eq QuotedCData)* S? '>' /* start-tags */ ... So my guess would be that the requirement for space before an attribute name simply slipped into a first draft for XML because it was more compact and unambiguous than, say Markup ::= '<' Name (S (Name Eq QuotedCData S?))* S? '>' and was never much of a topic for discussion thereafter. Notably, it isn't mentioned in James Clark's "Comparison of SGML and XML" (http://www.jclark.com/xml/NOTE-sgml-xml.html). Note that SGML also allows <test att = "x" otheratt = "y"> (ie with spaces before/after "=") and at least libxml2 (xmllint) happily accepts that syntax without complaining. From the same era, I'd also like to share Paul Prescott's answer to "Must XML be SGML-compatible?", as timely as ever: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/199710/msg00189.html Regards, M. Reichardt sgmljs.net
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