Re: [xsl] Whitespace between nodes

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick,

At 10:45 AM 5/13/2004, you wrote:
> Again, apologies - it was not frustration at the respondents not giving me 
> what I wanted, but that after a few replies came in I realised my question 
> had been misunderstood, primarily because of lack of detail on my part 
> (sorry!). So I responded to fill in the gaps and explain the question better.

There's no need at all to apologize.

Bottom line is you are in an area which is neither fully specified (XSLT is 
primarily concerned with tree-manipulation and tree-building, and how the 
output should be serialized for different output methods can be tricky; nor 
does XSLT 1.0 have an XHTML output method as you've seen) nor one that can 
be, perhaps, since it impinges on aesthetic as well as functional issues 
(people can get worked up about how many spaces should be indented, on the 
one hand; on the other, an algorithm to determine what's "significant" 
whitespace that should not be trimmed, or where whitespace may be added 
without affecting what is "significant", has to make assumptions that may 
not be warranted in the general case).

When writing XML output I've sometimes felt it necessary to resort to a 
pipelining approach, not dissimilar from what Andreas suggested. Have your 
transform write out XML with no indenting; then have a second transform to 
pretty up the output -- but not (quite) an identity transform with 
indent="yes", rather a near-identity transform that just adds whitespace 
where you want it (and only there).

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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