On Jeu 28 avril 2005 13:33, Daniel Veillard a �crit : > On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 05:54:55PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: >> Hi, >> >> Is there any good reason not to indent properly attributes when xmllint >> is >> invoked with --format ? When I say indenting I think about constructions >> like: >> >> <foo bar1="..." >> bar2="..." >> bar3="..."> >> >> which you see in all XML textbooks but can not achieve with most current >> XML formaters. > > because for document with a lot of deep, lots of attributes and little > CDATA you could end up with document serialization many multiplied by a > factor > or 2 or 3 easilly for no practical gain.
Well I assume when you ask document reformating you're ready to pay the formating cost. Or are you telling me some processes reformat on th fly without any real need to ? >> I ask this because someone told me last week that using more than one >> attribute per element should be avoided because the way tools indent >> them >> (inline) a human can not parse them easily (SIC) so one can not write >> readable XML with attributes. And indeed I see that any XML file that >> uses > > I see no valid argument there. Well, I'm afraid the other person was right when arguing that tools (including libxml) seem to consider attributes second-class citizens that should not be prettified alogside elements. >> namespace declarations (big fat attributes) is very difficult to read >> once >> reformated by xmllint - the output is fine for elements but not much >> else. > > There is so many axis to the "formatting" of markup, than trying to > provide customization for each an every axis would just be insanely > complex > and confusing APIs. The in-memory format is public, write your own > serializer > if you really need something very custom. It's not about doing something very custom. Since --format is useful only when a human reads the output (tools do not need the pretty indenting) I assumed its aim was to produce code as human-readable as possible, ie use the same tricks as in XML reference books. I don't see the point of indenting a document at all if a large part of its contents (attributes) is still lumped together. It does not take a lot of attributes to get line wrapping mess - it's a general case. Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot _______________________________________________ xml mailing list, project page http://xmlsoft.org/ [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/xml
