Re: Trimming (formatting-only) leading tabs/spaces fro

On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 2:59 PM, David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 07/06/2011 13:47, Philip Fearon wrote:
>>
>>  more effectively than text-only tools, trimming XSLT of
>> tabs/spaces therefore shouldn't be a problem a
>
> well so long as the thing that was trimming knew enough xslt syntax not to
> trim significant white space, which means knowing the interrelation between
> xsl:text xsl:strip-space xsl:preserve-space and xml:space, and in general
> (to know if xsl:strip-space or xsl:preserve-space apply), it needs to know
> full xslt pattern matching behaviour.
> (in practice you might want to assume that xsl:strip-space xsl:preserve
> space and xml:space aren't applied to the xsl file, which simplifies
things,
> but will lead to failures in edge cases).

Yes, xslt has well defined white space handling rules, this makes
things somewhat easier.
>
> However even if the white space formatter does only change insignificant
> white space, so the reformatting won't affect XML processing, it can be
> terribly annoying (and space costly) if the code is being stored in a
source
> code repository that (essentially) is storing line based diffs. If every
> time you touch the file it reflows it (or converts all line endings or
> whatever) then that ends up with a much bigger than expected diff showing
up
> in change log at each stage.

Yes, a potential issue, though lines by wouldn't be reflowed by
default. - I guess similar problems apply if someone accidentally
presses 'pretty-print' in the middle of a 'conventional' editing
session (there must be editor options to prevent this happening too).
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to be able to reinsert formatting that
strictly conformed to a configuration file, or, simpler still, a
sample XML file used as a model defining what formatting characters to
insert when editing is finished? - Most formatting is regular, but
I've notice that attribute names and values in particular sometimes
align with preceding names/values, but sometimes skip back to a
minimally indented position. Also some developers don't insert (quite
deliberately) indentation for elements prior to the first xsl:template
element, for example. Hopefully the commonly used diff tools treat XML
comments as insignificant because there are some potential issues
there too.

Phil Fearon
Qutoric
>
>
> David
>
>
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