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Re: What is @xml:space about?

• From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2012 16:00:02 +0100

xml:space="preserve" says that the author of the document believes all 
white space to be significant; xml:space="preserve" says that the 
recipient can do whatever he likes. I don't know of any applications 
that use this attribute for any purpose other than to decide whether 
whitespace-only text nodes should be preserved, but one could certainly 
argue that an XSLT stylesheet author who does normalize-space() on an 
element with xml:space="preserve" is ignoring the document author's 
intentions (which, of course, he is perfectly entitled to do).

Michael Kay
Saxonica


On 10/07/2012 14:06, John P. McCaskey wrote:
> What is @xml:space about?
>
> Jesper Tverskov (at http://www.xmlplease.com/xml/xmlspace/) and 
> Dimitre Novatchev (at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11372222) say 
> that @xml:space is, like <xsl:strip-space>, only about what to do with 
> whitespace-only text nodes. Dimitre suggests that the spec might be 
> ambiguous but that all implementations he knows read it as he does.
>
> But based on XML spec, fifth edition, 2.10 White Space Handling 
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#sec-white-space), I think @xml:space is for 
> telling an application whether it can proceed with whatever it was 
> planning to do with white space inside a text node (such as collapsing 
> it as an XSLT app making HTML might) or whether the application should 
> preserve the white space found in the node. By this understanding, if 
> an application collapsed white space in nodes, the white space-only 
> text nodes too would get collapsed, but that would be an indirect (and 
> inefficiently reached) result.
>
> Does @xml:space refer only to treatment of white space-only text nodes 
> or to treatment of all text nodes?
>
> Thanks,
> John
>
>
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• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: What is @xml:space about?
    • From: "John P. McCaskey" <groups@johnmccaskey.com>
  • Re: What is @xml:space about?
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>

• References:
  • What is @xml:space about?
    • From: "John P. McCaskey" <groups@johnmccaskey.com>