On Aug 4, 2005, at 2:45 PM, Patrick Ryan wrote:
User agents have always (and will always) ignore whitespace in their
display of XHTML. Should the DOM ignore it too? I recognize that's
kind of backward logic, but it's certainly the practical view.
Useragents better *not* ignore whitespace in their parsing of XHTML,
since any element can be styled with white-space:pre;
They only ignore the whitespace if the CSS tells them to, and even
then it needs to be stored in the DOM somehow because you may change
what styles get applied at any moment. In short, the whitespace is
and always will be important to keep track of, even if it is
routinely discarded during rendering.
It would be interesting to create a test case to see if IE parses the
DOM differently based on whether the element in question preserves
whitespace, and if that parsing changes when the white-space property
changes....
--
Ben Curtis : webwright
bivia : a personal web studio
http://www.bivia.com
v: (818) 507-6613
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