[whatwg] xml:space

[Křištof Želechovski]

This issue is not limited to PRE, nor is PRE the main application.  
There are numerous community Web sites 
that allow the users to submit hypertext content.  
You often get <I >italic </I ><B >bold</B > after you submit 
unless you use a zero-width non-joiner between them.
While this is not strictly a HTML problem, 
allowing xml:space would allow a workaround for broken CMS.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org
[mailto:whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org] On Behalf Of Ian Hickson
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 3:29 AM
To: Henri Sivonen; liorean; Anne van Kesteren; Martin Atkins
Cc: whatwg
Subject: Re: [whatwg] xml:space


I haven't done anything with xml:space. It doesn't do anything, and it's 
not an HTML5 thing, so as far as I can tell it is out of scope for HTML5.


On Mon, 22 Jan 2007, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> > 
> > Since this editor artifact is harmless in browsers and useful in 
> > editors, it would be nice if the spec made it conforming at least on 
> > the <pre> element in XHTML5.
>
> Suggested text:
>
> The xml:space attribute may be used on XHTML elements of XML documents. 
> Authors must not use the xml:space attribute in HTML documents. The 
> xml:space attribute, if present, must have the literal value "default" 
> or the literal value "preserve". The meaning of this attribute is 
> outside the scope of this specification.
> 
> If that's too permissive, here's what would minimally cover my use case: 
> In XHTML (but not in HTML), the element pre may have the attribute 
> xml:space. If the attribute is present, the value of the attribute must 
> be "preserve".
> 
> The first conforms to XML 1.0 for sure. The latter may not exactly, 
> depending on spec interpretation.

I don't see why we should special-case this particular harmless non-HTML 
feature, and not any number of other harmless non-HTML features. If 
another specification wants to define something, then it's up to that 
specification to define when it can be used.



On Tue, 23 Jan 2007, 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.
> 
> 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.

It seems that given the importance of XHTML, we can expect pretty printers 
to be written for it.