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Re: [xsl] Result still indented despite indent="no"


Subject: Re: [xsl] Result still indented despite indent="no"
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 09:54:48 GMT

  That would mean, default behaviour should be of
  whitespace stripping! This is exactly what IE is
  doing? Is'nt it fine! And IE is preserving whitespaces
  fine in presence of xml:space="preserve"..

No. What's supposed to happen is that the parser reports all white space,
always, but marks some white space as ignorable so that higher level
applications such as xslt can ignore it if they so choose, or in an
application like xslt have options (settable with xsl:stip-space and
xsl;preserve-space) on whether to ignore it or not. If the parser really
removes the white space (even if it got the correct white space nodes)
then an application doesn't get much choice in the matter.

I only mentioned the vagueness of the XML parser spec as it offers a
legalistic get out clause for more or less any kind of behaviour as it
wasn't written by lawyers but by technical peoplke with long experience
of sgml and just takes for granted many things. (It doesn't state
clearly that a parser has to report all elements in the right order, or
at all, for example).

  How do you rate this characteristic of IE from
  developer ease and cross-browser implementation point
  of view?

It's white space behaviour means it is utterly broken as an XML document
browser. You won't have any difficulty in finding people at MS who will
agree with that. However you might have difficulty in getting them to
change it (I hear there's going to be an IE7..) if you change it then
some stylesheets will behave differently and the problem with
distributing a piece of software to 90% of the world's desktops is that
people use it, and changing anything in a backward incompatible way
(even if it is fixing a bug) can get expensive (for your clients, not
for the person making the change). So it's a commercial issue not a
technical one.

David

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