Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin writes: > On 2003.12.09, 11:25, Peter Kirk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Philippe, you have now stated this (several times). But just a day > > earlier you yourself stated that the rule forbidding combining marks > > at the start of a string would never be relaxed because it is > > fundamental to the XML containment model. > > Well, but what if a "string" is intended to be the text enclosed by a > DIV object (or any other block level object) and therefore any SPAN > tag (or any other inline level object) is treated by the relevant > process as just an invisible, ignorable entity? > > This makes intuitive sense to me...
I explained that in another message related to the <span> tag in HTML which is not meant by itself to create concatenable strings, as a style sheet may apply there which changes its flow layout from inline to block. Nothing can be infered from the HTML or XML syntax, even if the elements are consecutive and share the same attributes: you cannot suppose that their content will concatenate into a single string, as you need first to apply the stylesheet to create the layout tree with its fully resolved styles. Then you need to compute the layout ordering, using information from fonts for metrics, to compute the "box model" properties of each element; then only you can compute the 2D layout, to create the rendering tree, which can then be optimized by merging sibling nodes sharing the exact same layout and style properties, from which you can finally render the strings contained in the simplified tree... This simplification of the final layout tree is optional, and a browser could as well just render the full layout tree directly when it is composed or dynamically generated on the fly, because it will save resources (no need to generate an internal layout documents), despite it may slow down the final graphic rendering with fonts. __________________________________________________________________ << ella for Spam Control >> has removed Spam messages and set aside Newsletters for me You can use it too - and it's FREE! http://www.ellaforspam.com
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