Re: Formatting_the_result

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 99/10/05 13:32 -0400, Ron Ross wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Brandon Ibach said:
> >    Actually, I was just suggesting we give users the option of having
> > OpenJade *not* put the newlines into the tags, and let them worry
> > about line length themselves, rather than having OpenJade try to sort
> > it out.
>
> If I can add my 2¢ again, I would second this motion if it obviates a
> lot of non-trivial work. It seems to me that it would produce output
> that is more readable and easier to "fix" in an editor that lets the
> user navigate the markup intelligently (such as Emacs-Psgml).

I would *only* support such an option if it was made painful to use and if 
it were made obvious to a user about the impact on their data and then I 
would only support it under protest as I think it will be misleading for 
people.

Regardless of the fact that people read markup, the computers that read the 
markup need to get the correct information.  Why make it look nice in an 
editor if it risks modifying the information?

Those who arbitrarily take the output from JADE and "reflow" the markup may 
be manually introducing data content that wasn't there in the first place.

I agree this is a lesser-understood area of the standard, but it is 
critically important from a data processing perspective.

I hope this is considered supportive to the discussion.

............. Ken

--
G. Ken Holman                    mailto:gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Crane Softwrights Ltd.             http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/d/
Box 266, Kars, Ontario CANADA K0A-2E0   +1(613)489-0999   (Fax:-0995)
Website:  XSL/XML/DSSSL/SGML services, training, libraries, products.
Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath      ISBN 1-894049-01-2
Next instructor-led training:  1999-11-08, 1999-11-09, 1999-12-05/06,
                             1999-12-07, 2000-02-27/28, 2000-05-11/12


DSSSList info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist