[whatwg] xml:space

[Martin Atkins]

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.