On 7 Mar 2018, at 11:03, Hussein Shafie wrote:
On 03/06/2018 07:54 PM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
According to the DITA 1.3 specification, the <lines> element
represents
“text where line breaks are significant but white space is not”.
[1]
However, XMLmind XML Editor (XXE) renders white space as significant.
And when ditac (dita converter) converts <lines> to HTML, the result
is
that white space, again, is treated as significant.
It could very well be that the interpretation of ditac and XXE makes
more sense for the use cases that <lines> are meant for,
Indeed.
For instance, one of the usecases - or perhaps the usecase - of <lines>
is poetry (I have also used it for that myself). However, in poetry,
white-space often /is/ significant.
Anyway, I started pondering about this when I thought of why, in XMLmind
XML Editor version 8.0, you have placed <lines> under the “listings”
button - I felt that <lines>, as it is defined by DITA, behaved rather
different from the other kinds of ”listings”. Because it was not
obvious how to translate <listings>, I pondered translating it as the
equivalent of ”line-break significant paragraphs", since - due to how
<lines> is defined - significant line-breaks is, in the theory, the one
thing that the elements under the ”listings” button have in common.
But then I tested how ditac and XXE actually behaved ... And it makes
/more/ sense to say ”listings” if white space /is/ significant in
<lines>.
It would be interesting to know how the DITA Open Toolkit behaves in
this regard ... (But with what I know today, I think the DITA working
group should rethink <lines> ... along the above lines.)
but I would
nevertheless bring this to your attention and ask for a
clarification.
[1]
http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/dita/v1.3/errata01/os/complete/part3-all-inclusive/langRef/base/lines.html#lines
Sorry but we don't know how to implement “text where line breaks are
significant but white space is not”. So this is really a limitation
of XMLmind XML Editor (XXE) and XMLmind DITA Converter (ditac).
The editor of XXE treats white space as significant even HTML <p>
paragraphs - even if they are still insignificant in the output. Thus,
the fact that XXE has this limitation, does not really count as an
argument against.
This leaves ditac as the only potentially ”real” issue. However, at
least for ditac’s HTML output, it would be very simple to comply with
the DITA spec:
pre {white-space: pre-line}
/* https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/white-space */
--
Leif Halvard Silli
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