Re: [xsl] best practices for preserving spaces in mixed content when making XML to XML

["John P. McCaskey" <groups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dorothy,

Challenges of preserving whitespace in mixed content come up often in TEI encoding. You may find this helpful:
http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/XML_Whitespace

-- John



On 9/6/2013 12:32 PM, Dorothy Hoskins wrote:
> HI, I would like advice on the following situation:
> I am copying the majority of one XML to another XML but I want to
> insert some label text into some elements.
> Beginning XML:
> <note type="warning"><para>This is <b>mixed content</b> text for a
> specific purpose.para></note>
>
> Final XML could be this:
> <note type="warning"><para><label>label text: </label>This is <b>mixed
> content</b> text for a specific purpose.</para></note>
>
> or it could be this:
> <note type="warning"><label>label text: </label><para>This is <b>mixed
> content</b> text for a specific purpose.</para></note>
> The <label> will have distinctive output formatting.
>
> My questions:
> 1) Which output is generally preferable, when <para> is a block
> element - <label> before <para> or <label> inside <para>? Since <para>
> is a block element, it seems that it would be better to put the
> <label> inside the <para> rather than before it, within the <note>.
>
> 2) Assuming that I might want to make changes within the <para> also,
> what is the best method to preserve the spaces around inline elements
> such as <b>? For example, if there is an inline <image> in the <para>,
> I might want to change its @href>, but probably I would simply copy
> the <b>. If there aren't any inlines, I could just copy the <para>
> without further processing, but I've had a problem retaining the
> spaces around inlines when using apply-templates.
>
> 3) Is it better practice to insert the punctuation (colon and space)
> after generated label text as part of the <label> content, or to
> output them as text literals after the <label>? For example, I can
> generate the text of the label inside the <label> element, followed by
> <xsl:text>: </xsl:text> or use some other method such as a variable to
> externalize the following punctuation and pull that variable value in
> with logic, so that the punctuation could be different for different
> languages.
>
> Thanks, Dorothy