xml:space

[Michael J. Suzio]

What I wonder is, how does SAX decide what is ignorable
whitespace and what is significant?  I'm not clear on how that
works, and the role xml:space plays in defining that.  
Ignoring whitespace is one of the most tedious things I keep doing
in my XML parsing apps, I'd prefer to have to explicitly *work* to
keep whitespace.
What I don't understand is, given something like this in a DTD:

<!ELEMENT QUOTE (SOURCE?|LINE+|KEY+)>

Why wouldn't *any* character data located within
<QUOTE></QUOTE> (and not inside one of it's child
elements) be ignorable?  I'd expect a parser seeing this:
<QUOTE>
 <SOURCE href="http://www.quotesrus.com/">
 <LINE>This is line 1 of the quote</LINE>
</QUOTE>

To ignore those carriage returns and extraneous spaces within the
QUOTE element, and just give me the SOURCE and LINE elements and
their content.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but it has been bugging me the
last couple weeks.

-- 
Michael J. Suzio
Web Technical Standards, WWW & Internet Applications
(313) 24-88120
msuzio at eccms1.dearborn.ford.com / msuzio at ford.com

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