XSchema Spec Section 2.2, Draft 1

[John Cowan]

Peter Murray-Rust wrote:

> Unless there is
> sensible running text whose prime purpose is to be read by humans there is
> no particular value in having mixed content (i.e. strings + elements mixed).

I have an application in mind (which I'm not ready to disclose publicly
yet) which will have many elements with mixed content, of the form
"running text with occasional empty elements in it".  This text
will not necessarily be meant for human consumption: it may be
programming language code.

>         The responsible thing to do is to provide enough DTD information to make
> it clear that the prettyprinting whitespace is insignificant. It only needs
> a few contentspecs in the internal subset. Thus <ELEMENT foo (bar | baz)*>
> will drive SAX to identify any whitespace children of foo and flag it as
> ignorable.

Not necessarily!  Depending on the underlying parser, SAX may or may
not report the WS as ignorable-WS.

>         I suspect that for newcomers to XML prettyprinting will be the de facto
> standard. They won't realise the whitespace issue even exists. However,
> when JUMBO2 reads an unknown file without a DTD it faithfully displays
> whitespace-only nodes. To try to help this I have a button in JUMBO2 called
> 'delete whitespace'. This will remove whitespace PCDATA recursively from
> the descendants of a selected node (or the root node if none selected).

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan at ccil.org
	You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
	You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
		Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)

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