[whatwg] xml:space

[Henri Sivonen]

On Jan 23, 2007, at 23:15, Martin Atkins wrote:

> 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.

Exactly.

On Jan 23, 2007, at 17:45, liorean wrote:
> Well, considering the purpose of XHTML (main purpose is presentation
> for humans, no?) is there any reason to NOT just set it to default to
> "preserve" on the html element, fixed to "preserve" on the script,
> style, pre and textarea elements and have it implied through an entity
> for all other elements?

Since this is about generic XML tools, XHTML-specific rules don't help.

(And this isn't theoretical, either. I came across this issue when  
editing an XHTML document in oXygen.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/