RE: MSXML Whitespace handling

Jeni,

1. If we had a mode where the XSL processor was in direct control of the
load, then I would certainly "set" preserveWhiteSpace=true by default
(though in actuality, I'd probably be building the cache directly from
SAX-like events, rather than using the DOM builder).  Such a mode is
definitely under consideration for future versions because there are several
optimizations to be made if XSL builds the cache rather than DOM.

2. It is not possible at this point to change the DOM's preserveWhiteSpace
default, because it would break applications already in production.  We'll
just have to do a good job in showing users how to get the output they want
in this scenario via documentation.

3. As I mentioned in a reply to Mike Brown, it may be possible to change the
default of the IE5 mimeviewer, though that too is problematic for
backwards-compatibility reasons.

4. Stylesheet validation takes place during the XSLT compile phase, during a
DOM walk performed by the XSL processor.  Remember that the DOM cannot
validate the incoming stylesheet on load (or attempt to apply XSLT
whitespace rules), since at that point it does not know that the incoming
XML is a stylesheet.  In fact, it may not even be a valid stylesheet on load
-- the user might modify it after loading it into the DOM in order to make
it a valid stylesheet (for example, dynamically adding a named template that
is referenced elsewhere in the stylesheet).

~Andy Kimball
MSXSL Dev


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