Re: Indentation question

"knocte " <knocte@xxxxxxxxx> writes: 
 
>>When you run a transformation and get breaks and spaces in the XML, 
>>that is no different than than your HTML analogy.  Whomever _consumes_ 
>>the XML needs to treat newlines as spaces.  Which keeps to your 
>>HTML/browser analogy. 
 
> Well, actually the thing is a web application that is consumed by a  
> browser, but I see that giving the response in only one line, like it  
> was "compressed", is shorter, cleaner and thus, better (I know that the  
> browser will ignore them too). 
 
You chose to add spaces and breaks to your HTML to make it more 
readable and the bandwidth apparently was not a concern then.  Since 
XML is also supposed to be readable, why insist on 1 line XML file? 

The sequences: 
   A: "this word" 
   B: "thatnword" 
 
are exactly the same length.  So A (1 line) is not more "compressed" 
than B (2 lines).  Sure you may save a few spaces it you delete 
indentation spaces, but that is probably nominal.  I dont necessarily 
buy "shorter, cleaner and thus, better". 
 
If I have an XML file that I need to view or edit, then I like to have 
proper indentation for readability.  If the XML is only going to be 
short lived and consumed by a computer, then I make sure it is at 
least well-formed (if not valid) and pretty much leave the spacing up 
to the tools ... they usually do the right thing(tm). 
 
> I think that I am wondering if a solution to this would be that the  
> second stylesheet that process the result of the first one should  
> normalize-space all tags that contain text unless the ones with an  
> attribute like notnormalize="false". What do you think? Is it possible? 
 
Sure it is.  In fact, there are a lot of ways to do this.  Here's one 
way off the top of my head (I'm sure the list can supply 100 others!): 
 
   <xsl:template match="text()[ not(parent::*/@notnormalize='false') ]"> 
      <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)" /> 
   </xsl:template> 
 
Have fun, 
--  
Rodman