[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: XSchema Spec Section 2.2, Draft 1

• From: Paul Prescod <papresco@t...>
• To: XML Dev <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 13:45:22 -0400 (EDT)

On Mon, 22 Jun 1998, John Cowan wrote:

> I think that the notion of "insignificant" whitespace is a sop, partly
> to SGML, partly to people (like me, I admit) who want to pretty-print
> XML, and partly to element-blind processes that want to be able to
> ignore pretty-printing without having to know what they are doing.
> 
> Processes that attach semantics to particular elements will know
> whether or not to ignore whitespace, because they will expect either
> element content or mixed content for each container element.

This will often work in practice. I consider it extremely distasteful to 
have an application actually decide not just what data *means* but what 
really *is* data and what is just markup convenience. Encoding pretty 
printing as meaningful data in the hopes that the processing code will 
correctly guess which is which is sloppy and will probably be error 
prone. AFAIK, there is no perfect solution, and what we have is no more 
broken than most of the other potential solutions we had available. It is, 
nevertheless, broken.

 Paul Prescod

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i...
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: XSchema Spec Section 2.2, Draft 1
    • From: Peter Murray-Rust <peter@u...>

• References:
  • Re: XSchema Spec Section 2.2, Draft 1
    • From: John Cowan <cowan@l...>

• Prev by Date: XML-CDIF
• Next by Date: Re: words (RE: extensibility in XSchema?)
• Previous by thread: Re: XSchema Spec Section 2.2, Draft 1
• Next by thread: Re: XSchema Spec Section 2.2, Draft 1
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread