Anne van Kesteren wrote:
xml:space can't affect the tree being formed as far as I know. It's not
entirely clear to me what its use is anyway, except in SVG, where they
defined it in a funny way to make it do something.
Presumably its primary purpose is to act as a signal to generic XML
tools — that don't have any special knowledge about XHTML — that they
should not screw around with the whitespace inside PRE, etc.
One obvious example of such a tool is an XML pretty-printer. While an
HTML pretty-printer like HTML Tidy can have rules "hard-coded" into it,
this is not true of a non-validating XML formatter unless it is
specifically written for XHTML.
- Re: [whatwg] xml:space Martin Atkins
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