Peter Davis wrote: > On Wednesday 10 July 2002 06:22, David Marston/Cambridge/IBM wrote: > > This way, indent="yes" gets you new-lines > > but no traditional indenting > > Just curious, why are newlines better than traditional indenting? Especially > when it confuses so many people? As a user, I hope that the default will be > changed to 4 (or 2).
It may help to understand what the XSLT spec is talking about here. Conceptually, a DOM serializer could output just one long string without any spaces or newlines except for those in CDATA or text nodes. The indent setting is the one indulged convenience because many text editors just wouldn't be able to handle one long string of output. The indent=yes setting MAY be implemented to insert whitespace, which may be merely newlines. I think the XSLT spec and the Xalan implementation did not want to spec pretty-printing. This can be done with a custom serializer or separate program, or even with an XML viewer such as Internet Explorer. .
