XML and whitespace: lets just dump CR and LF!

[Rick Jelliffe]

> From: Tim Bray <tbray at textuality.com>
 
> Heh-heh.  If you go look in the proceedings of the 1988 Usenix conference,
> you'll find a paper I wrote, on the Oxford English Dictionary project,
> which has a section entitled
> 
>  '\n' Considered Harmful
> 
> I'd love to lose the record-end silliness.  Trouble is, we're stuck with
> it until we have better editing tools. -T.
 
I'm not saying to ban the characters, merely to say give them no significance
for an application.  So we can still use our existing editing tools.

For example, using vi or sed to add the unambiguous newline to an existing file,
which will be stuck in an HTML-like <PRE>, it is merely a rule like 
   1,$s/$/\&#x2028;/
which is trivial.  

We can do this only because we are using ISO 10646 as the document character
set: since we have the chance to clear up the mess with a simple convention,
why not take it!


Rick Jelliffe

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