On Mon, 2019-12-09 at 20:27 +0100, Arjan Loeffen wrote:
>
> In general: when the wiki states here: "Many XML documents include
> whitespaces that have been added to improve readability. ", this
> should not
> apply to mixed content fragments as described. Only to start and end
> of
> "text content of elements", not on text nodes.
> I therefore also think that the second approach is not exactly in
> line with
> the *intention *of the XML standard.
It isn't, but some of the earliest XML parsers had the option to drop
white-space-only text nodes (e.g. MSXML i think) because of XML used in
data contexts. The intent was that a DTD could be used to determine
which spaces to ignore, but then DTDs became optional.
A parser without a DTD does not know which elements _could_ contain
text, and hence doesn't know what to drop. In addition, markup like,
<person>
<name>
Nigel
</name>
<obedience>
0.4
</obedience>
</person>
is common, unfortunately. In SGML this worked but the whitespace rules
were complex enough that were a constant source of trouble.
Liam
--
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
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