At 02:27 05/05/04, Thomas Broyer wrote:
>
>Martin Duerst wrote:
>> At 03:33 05/04/29, Alexey Melnikov wrote:
>> > > If the value is "text", the content of the Text construct MUST NOT
>> > > contain child elements. Such text is intended to be presented to
>> > > humans in a readable fashion. Thus, Atom Processors MAY collapse
>> > > white-space (including line-breaks),
>> >
>> >Ok, maybe it is just me, but what does it mean to "collapse >white-space"? Does this mean to replace FWS (in RFC 2822 sense) with a >single space?
>> Making this more precise is definitely desirable. But there is also
>> an i18n issue: This works fine for languages that use spaces between
>> words. It doesn't work for languages that don't have spaces between
>> words (Chinese, Japanese, Thai,...). If Text elements are only used
>> for short things such as names or titles, that's not a big issue,
>> the text in question can just be put on a single line. However,
>> when the texts in question are long, it's a serious issue, and
>> should be fixed.
>
>My understanding of type="text" is that this is "just text" without any "formatting".
That's my understanding, too.
>Hence, it is not meant to be "preformatted text" such as text/plain or inside an (X)HTML "pre".
Yes. But that's exactly where the spacing problems with Chinese/Japanese/Thai are. There are no such problems for preformatted text, because the line breaking in the source (as sent) is the same as the line breaking when displayed. For free-flowing text, however, the line breaks in the source and those in the display are not (necessarily) the same, and so linebreaks have to be changed to spaces for Western languages, but to nothing for Chinese/Japanese (and most possibly to a zero-width non-breaking space for Thai), and the spec has to say something about this.
Regards, Martin.
>This means type="text" content is a single paragraph of text. If you need paragraphs, lists or any other "structural formatting", you have to use type="html" or type="xhtml" with the appropriate content.
>
>I was about to writing a Pace about white-space handling in type="text" (either using xml:space or an attribute that would have mimic'd the "white-space" CSS property) when I understood/recalled that Text Constructs have accessibility in mind (hence their limitation to textual contents) and preformatted text is not accessible enough.
>
>--
>Thomas Broyer
>
