Re: Whitespace

Rick Jelliffe (ricko@allette.com.au)
Mon, 25 Aug 1997 00:45:48 +1000


From: Sean Mc Grath <digitome@iol.ie>

> If you need whitespace to be something other than whitespace- i.e. a
> newline to be a real newline to be passed on to the application, use an
> empty element type to represent it.

> <foo>
> <pcdata>I am data 1</pcdata><newline/>
> <pcdata>I am data 2</pcdata>
> </foo>

Yes and no. <newline/> is not needed in XML. ISO10646 includes
characters which unambigously represent line-breaks and paragraph breaks:
U+2028 and U+2029.

<foo>I am data 1&#x2028;I am data 2</foo>

Any conventions for handling whitespace in XML do not need to address
"hard returns". If someone wants a hard return, they can mark it up
explicitly just using what XML already provides (by adopting ISO 10646).

Similarly, XML-DEV does not need to make up any conventions to handle
no-break spaces (&nbsp; or &#x00A0;) or "hard spaces" (ideographic space
does not collapse: &#x3000;).

Lets not make this more complicated than it is!

Rick Jelliffe

P.S. In the example quoted, I think probably <RCDATA> is a closer
description of the element rather than <PCDATA>.