[tei-council] xml:space

Martin Holmes mholmes at uvic.ca
Mon Feb 8 12:30:20 EST 2010


Gabriel Bodard wrote:
>  From what I can see, Syd's argument was not that @xml:space should not 
> be allowed, but that it should not be global, because it is meaningless 
> on empty elements such as <catRef/>. If this really worries people then 
> I could get behind a proposal to only introduce it on <tei:div> and a 
> few other block level elements, for example. (But it doesn't worry me.)

It doesn't worry me either. As Lou pointed out today, there are lots of 
ways in which you can encode things nonsensically without breaking 
validity. While we might want to use the schema to disallow such things 
where it's easy to do so, in this case it would be hard. We'd end up 
having to create a class of elements worthy of xml:space, and there 
would be ongoing debate about which elements deserved to be members of 
that class. Far simpler to allow it and be done with it. If I want to go 
for

<graphic url="stuff.jpg" xml:space="preserve"/>

then (probably) more fool me.

[Cue someone with a compelling use-case for @xml:space on <graphic/>.]

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)
Half-Baked Software, Inc.
(mholmes at halfbakedsoftware.com)
martin at mholmes.com


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