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Re: What is @xml:space about?

• From: "John P. McCaskey" <groups@johnmccaskey.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2012 11:36:49 -0400

On 7/10/2012 11:00 AM, Michael Kay wrote:

> 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, 

For stripping whitespace-only text nodes, <xsl:strip-space> would be 
more efficient and would avoid counting such nodes with count(). Yes?

The examples in 2.10 White Space Handling seem good, viz., use 
xml:space='preserve' for source code and poetry, things that in (old) 
HTML would naturally get put in <pre>. I'd have thought using xml:space 
as intended would not be rare. It seems a pretty useful attribute.

I see that XALAN lets xml:space=preserve override xsl:strip-space 
(http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/xsltc/xsl_whitespace_design.html). Is 
that in a spec? Do all XSLT processors do that?

-- John

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: What is @xml:space about?
    • From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>

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