RE: [xsl] xmllint -format, xsltproc and CDATA section

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 10:55 AM 8/28/2003, Taro wrote (to Mike):
> Your book talks about canonical documents, and what I want is
> a tool that indents a document without changing its semantics.

But that's the nub of the problem.

Define the "semantics" of white space, and we're done. :->

In SGML, in which the DTD is required for a document to be processed, it is 
possible to define "insignificant" whitespace by reference to an element's 
content model. (If #PCDATA appears, whitespace is significant.)

In XML, in which a DTD may or may not be processed, it's impossible to 
define what whitespace is significant (must therefore be left alone) and 
what is insignificant (may be munged and remunged without damage) in the 
general case. To ameliorate this, XSLT gives you xsl:preserve-space and 
xsl:strip-space, which allows you some control by element type. This makes 
the problem more tractable in XSLT, providing you're willing to hand-wire 
the semantics in at that level.

It'd be nice of xmllint to leave CDATA marked sections alone, but that's 
just the tip of the iceberg. (Think of how much poetry on the web is marked 
up with <pre> to control whitespace. Ugh.)

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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