On Fri, 2022-11-18 at 18:39 +0000, Lizzi, Vincent wrote: > Hi Liam, > > XML's way handling of space characters is understandably an > improvement over SGML, but it still causes problems sometimes and > seems more complex than it perhaps could be. Although the ship has > long since sailed, out of curiosity do you recall if there were any > suggestions for a rule to ensure that spaces (and absence of spaces) > would be consistently preserved without relying on a DTD or Schema?
There were. There was a lot of discussion around this. The main proposals were (1) disallow mixed content entirely, and require an element to contain text. <p><T>Karen </T><emph>actually</em><T> smiled at this idea.</T?</p> It's easy to see why this didn't get much traction from document people. (2) require mixed or text elements to use different syntax, e.g. <@p>Karen <@emph>actually</@emph> smiled at this idea.</@p> This would have ruled out XHTML, however, or any other pre-existing SGML vocabulary, and at that time that was 100% of all content: there was no XML content outside of the examples in the specification itself. At one point i remember (foolishly) suggesting upper-case element names for ones that count not contain text directly (or the other way round, i forget), but of course this wouldn't work in a multilingual world where not all languages have upper and lower case. XML was developed before XML Schema. When we started, a DTD was required; by the end, DTDs were optional (i had Charles Goldfarb calling me at home over this, trying to find ways to keep DTDs as mandatory!) but i think we didn't revisit all of the decisions in this light. > A relatively safe way to "pretty print" indent XML is to only insert > or remove spaces between an element's name and closing > and where > spaces already exist in text nodes. Yes, there are tools that can do this, too. > > However I haven't seen any XML editor or processor implement this > approach. I think maybe xmllint can, i'm not sure. And possibly xml tidy, and maybe James' xp has something like this. Overall i think it tends to confuse people more than it helps, though. I'm not sure. liam -- Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/ Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/ XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting. Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations: http://www.fromoldbooks.org
