On 31 Jan 2005, at 1:43 am, Tim Bray wrote:
Currently, the draft says *nothing* about xml:space (unless I'm mis-using the search function). If you read the specification for xml:space (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-white-space), all it says is that this is a message from the author to downstream software. So there is nothing anywhere that says anything normative about xml:space. Thus, nobody has any standing, or reasonable grounds for expectation, that inserting an xml:space necessarily causes any downstream behavior. Thus, I'm not sure why this assertion is necessary; and it feels kind of weird.
That didn't stop Blogger trying to do some dead weird stuff with it. An excerpt from the first Google result for such is:
<summary type="application/xhtml+xml" xml:base="http://home.earthlink.net/~beyonddeadline/"; xml:space="preserve">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";>So you read in the newspaper that a $59 gizmo can be used to harass and endanger the lives of pilots, including those flying police helicopters. Do you:
a) Say to yourself “how terrible” and move on to the comics.
b) Wonder aloud if your friend who uses one of these things in corporate presentations knows about this?
c) Think to yourself about the irony of an aircraft that cost thousands of</div>
</summary>
It's the line breaks that are the worst. Maybe the spec they need pointing to is the xml:space one and not something added to Atom.
Graham
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