[whatwg] [WA1] Insignificant white space

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Robin Berjon wrote:
> fantasai wrote:
> > # The whitespace characters U+0020 SPACE, U+000A LINE FEED, and U+000D
> > CARRIAGE # RETURN are always allowed between elements.
> > 
> > What about U+0009 TAB?
> 
> And NEL and VERTICAL TAB?

All the above except NEL have now been space characters for a while.

NEL isn't, mostly because in practice nobody uses it, and adding new space 
characters is moderately expensive. UAs with different sets of space 
characters will end up with different behaviour, e.g. in processing the 
class attribute. It's also desireable for us to have the raw syntax be 
a pure subset of ASCII, so that you can safely code HTML parsers and be 
certain that they won't parse documents syntactically differently based 
just on whether the encoding was correctly guessed or not (so long as 
you're within a subset of ASCII).

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'