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Re: whitespace normalization (was Re: CreateXML)

• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Subject: Re: whitespace normalization (was Re: CreateXML)
• From: Mitch Amiano <mamiano@n...>
• Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 23:50:32 -0400
• Cc: "xml-dev@l..." <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <5.2.0.9.2.20030620103644.03336e10@s...>
• Organization: Software Adjuvant
• References: <20030620034910.1E6EB13383E@b...> <20030620034910.1E6EB13383E@b...> <5.2.0.9.2.20030620103644.03336e10@s...>
• Reply-to: mitch.amiano@s...
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030507

There was a time when I enjoyed the ability to run 'diff' on the output of a filter, expecting to review just the bits that were actually different.

You just have to be extra careful. I'd put it in the same class as script quoting/special delimiter difficulties. (That was the topic to begin with, wasn't it?)

- Mitch

Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> At 11:49 AM 6/20/2003 +0700, James Clark wrote:
> 
>> It's worse than this.  If your infoset contains a carriage return, you 
>> have to output it as a numeric character reference, otherwise line-end 
>> normalization will turn it into a line-feed. Similarly, if attribute 
>> values in the infoset contain line-feeds or tabs, they need to be 
>> output as numeric character references, otherwise attribute value 
>> normalization will turn them into spaces.
> 
> 
> The more I've looked at whitespace normalization by XML processors, the 
> more it seem to be a convenience for one group of users which produces 
> strange and largely unavoidable inconveniences for other classes of 
> users.  The complexity seems to grow especially rapidly if multiple 
> parse/manipulate/re-serialize cycles occur.
> 
> (Then there were parsers which called themselves "XML applications", 
> with their own expectations for whitespace processing, but I haven't 
> looked into MSXML whitespace handling in a while.)
> 
> I now have a processor (Ripper) that lets me do my own normalization (or 
> not), but this seems generally like a field where more consideration 
> might be a good idea.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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• References:
  • Re: Create XML
    • From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
  • whitespace normalization (was Re: Create XML)
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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