[tei-council] @xml:space, whitespace and http://purl.org/tei/bug/3600991

[Rebecca Welzenbach]

John's prose looks really good to me--it is extremely clear and
sensible. His understanding of this issue is much deeper than mine, so
his account of these issues is gratefully welcomed. I had some
reservations about whether this entire discussion belonged in the
guidelines, preferring to err on the side of saying less and leaving a
fuller discussion of how whitespace works to other platforms (like the
wiki, where John has already graciously contributed a lot about this).
However, the way John has written this ties the discussion clearly to
a TEI-centric view of understanding the possible values for
@xml:space, so it makes sense to me to include it.



On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 9:22 AM, Sebastian Rahtz
<sebastian.rahtz at it.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On 16 Jan 2013, at 13:57, James Cummings <James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk>
>  wrote:
>
>>
>> Some of the confusion, I think, might revolve around the
>> dichotomy (which TEI exposes as false) between a simplistic view
>> of an element's content as 'structured' or 'mixed content'.  The
>> TEI allows the same element to act as both and <persName> is
>> indeed a good example of this.
>
> i dont agree. persName is a mixed-content element, always. you may choose
> to pretend thats not so, in your project, but the TEI schema says that
> it can contain text nodes, so anything you put in must be treated as such
>
>> If it is not mixed content then the tests
>> I've done indicate it is usually treated as if it is what John
>> calls a 'structured' element.  To do otherwise implies
>> schema-aware processing.
>
> no, no, and no. i think you're falling into john's trap
>
>> There are plenty of times I've treated
>> <persName> as if it is a 'structured' element... in fact I prefer
>> to do that.
> i honestly think you are confusing two issues
>
>   * whether you choose to record punctuation, or insert it at render time
>   * whether the whitespace between elements is, according to the TEI,
>  meaningful
>
>>  I've never used @xml:space to indicate my intention,
>> just relied on things following the same assumptions as me.
>
> and thats what causes John to have no hair, and a bruise on his
> head from banging it on the wall. xml:space is simply not
> relevant to whether those line endings after <forename>
> are significant or not.
>
> but i wholeheartedly agree, just remove the sentence
> "If it is done, the schema should be customised to record the fact"
> - what he means is, redefine the element so that the element
> cannot cannot text, and then adjust your strip-space accordingly.
>
> --
> Sebastian Rahtz
> Director (Research Support) of Academic IT Services
> University of Oxford IT Services
> 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
>
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