At 04:32 05/05/04, Graham wrote:
>
>On 28 Apr 2005, at 7:33 pm, Alexey Melnikov wrote:
>
>> 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?
>
>Since the statement is a MAY, I don't think any exact meaning is
>necessary. It's simply a hint to publishers that whitespace may not
>be preserved.
>
>
>On 29 Apr 2005, at 10:17 am, Martin Duerst wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>A consumer may do anything that can reasonably be described as
>"collapsing whitespace", but are not required to. How does this cause
>problems in Asian languages?
If the consumer does the right thing, it won't cause problems. But the chance that the consumer does the right thing without being told what this is (or, without being told that this is different for different languages or scripts) is rather low. So we better improve the spec to help consumers do a better job.
Regards, Martin.
