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Re: What does it mean to lexically distinguish significant and

• From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
• To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
• Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2017 12:45:17 +0100

What I meant by the phrase is that when you see

<a>
  <b/>
</a>

there is nothing within the document itself to tell you whether the whitespace is significant; you typically need external information (e.g. a schema or DTD, or just outside knowledge) to know.

One can envisage other notations that make such a distinction: e.g. if all significant text appeared within chevrons, it would be

<a>
  <b/>
</a>

versus

<a>«
»<b/>«
»</a>

Michael Kay


> On 13 Sep 2017, at 12:33, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> wrote:
> 
> Michael Kay wrote:
> 
>> significant and insignificant whitespace
>> can't be lexically distinguished.
> 
> What does that mean? 
> 
> What does it mean to "lexically distinguish" significant and insignificant whitespace?
> 
> /Roger
> 
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• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: What does it mean to lexically distinguish significantand insignificant whitespace?
    • From: John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>

• References:
  • What does it mean to lexically distinguish significant andinsignificant whitespace?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>