Whitespace

[Rick Jelliffe]

From: Sean Mc Grath <digitome at iol.ie>
 
> If you need whitespace to be something other than whitespace- i.e. a
> newline to be a real newline to be passed on to the application, use an
> empty element type to represent it.

> <foo>
>   <pcdata>I am data 1</pcdata><newline/>
>   <pcdata>I am data 2</pcdata>
> </foo>

Yes and no.  <newline/> is not needed in XML.  ISO10646 includes 
characters which  unambigously represent line-breaks and paragraph breaks: 
U+2028 and U+2029.

<foo>I am data 1&#x2028;I am data 2</foo>

Any conventions for handling whitespace in XML do not need to address
"hard returns".  If someone wants a hard return, they can mark it up
explicitly just using what XML already provides (by adopting ISO 10646).

Similarly, XML-DEV does not need to make up any conventions to handle 
no-break spaces (&nbsp; or &#x00A0;) or "hard spaces" (ideographic space 
does not collapse: &#x3000;).

Lets not make this more complicated than it is!



Rick Jelliffe

P.S. In the example quoted, I think probably <RCDATA> is a closer
description of the element rather than <PCDATA>.


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