[tei-council] comments on ST

Thu Oct 18 15:04:18 EDT 2007

> I claim that xml:space is a part of XML, and that as such TEI users
> expect to have it available. I don't see why we should so rigidily
> say that there is no use for it in the TEI.

Which TEI users have you in mind? I claim the vast majority of TEI
users don't know what xml:space= is, let alone the problems
associated with it. Which is the main reason why I think that putting
it in the TEI schema without an adequate explanation is worse than
leaving it out. I note that many, if not most, XML languages do not
declare xml:space=[1].

But in fact, it's not even clear it should be in the TEI schema even
with adequate explanation. It may well be argued that it really
doesn't make sense to use xml:space= for documents that have schemas
(where the processor can look and see if space is
<soCalled>ignorable</> or not). And, perhaps more importantly, TEI is
not *about* the processing, it's about the encoding of extant
sources. Which is why rend= is still about how the source appeared.
xml:space= doesn't really fit into indicative logical markup very
well.

xml:space=preserve constitutes a suggestion to a processor that any
"crush the whitespace" behaviors it might be used to be curbed. But
it's not as though the processor doesn't know about the whitespace --
parsers are *required* to pass it on.

Note
----
[1] I've just quickly glanced at:
    * Ecological Metadata Language (EML)
    * Mathematical Markup Language
    * MusicXML
    * The Information and Content Exchange (ICE) Protocol
    * Resource Description Framework (RDF)
    * Chemical Markup Language (CML)
    * CMLReact (related to above, don't know how)
    * PIDL - Personalized Information Description Language
    and none of them use xml:space= at all. Furthermore, some schemas
    that you would expect to have xml:space= (because they are for
    authoring documents) only use it in limited ways:
    * Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Simple Hypertext DTD (IBTWSH) -- only on
      root <html> element
    * DocBook -- only "preserve" on certain elements
    * DHQ -- only on <eg>
    The only languages I know about that seem to have it declared more
    generally are out of the W3C:
    * XHTML 
    * SVG