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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: SAX and ignorableWhitespace
 Hi Elliotte, Thanks for answering... > The word "ignorable" is an > unfortunate choice here. It means the application receiving the data > may choose to ignore it. However, the parser cannot ignore this > content. It must provide it. I am willing to take that on faith, but just for the sake of throroughness, my question is more "why must it provide it". It seems that the same argument could be made for element and attribute declarations. Clearly the parser cannot ignore them, yet it is not required that the information be passed in one of the default interfaces-- they are only reported through the DeclHandler, an extension interface. So there is a precedent for the parser "not ignoring" a section of the document, yet simultaneously "not providing" it. > White space is only really ignorable if > there's a DTD, and even then you may choose not to ignore it. Point taken, but can't you also argue that ignorableWhitespace should never be called without a DTD. So the case where there is no DTD is moot, all character information would be reported through the characters function. In which case the analogous elementDecl, attributeDecl and the like seem to verify that it could safely be relegated to an extension interface. IIRC, the SAX interface set predates the Infoset spec, so any mandate to provide specific information to the application must have come from somewhere else. The following wording in the XML spec seems to be the source: "In editing XML documents, it is often convenient to use "white space" (spaces, tabs, and blank lines) to set apart the markup for greater readability. Such white space is typically not intended for inclusion in the delivered version of the document. On the other hand, "significant" white space that should be preserved in the delivered version is common, for example in poetry and source code. An XML processor must always pass all characters in a document that are not markup through to the application. A validating XML processor must also inform the application which of these characters constitute white space appearing in element content." [1] Of course, reporting through the extensions is still viable. But the wording in the spec is pretty convincing. Can anyone confirm that this is indeed why the ignorableWhitespace function is found within the ContentHandler. Maybe my question was why this statement was included in the XML specification to begin with... [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml.html#sec-white-space Hungry for answers, Jeff Rafter 
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