Especially given the following sentence in the XML spec (emphasis
added):
"On the other hand,
"significant" white space that should be preserved in the
delivered version is common, for example in poetry and
source code."
Best,
Kris
Kristen James Eberlein
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting
www.eberleinconsulting.com
+1 919 622-1501; kriseberlein (skype)
On 8/23/2019 5:44 PM, Robert D Anderson
wrote:
Thanks to a customer defect report, I just
noticed some seemingly incompatible rules in our spec around
the <lines> element:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/dita/v1.3/errata02/os/complete/part1-base/langRef/base/lines.html
The first sentence is pretty clear:
> The <lines>
element contains text where line breaks are significant but
white space is not.
However -- we also set a fixed attribute of
xml:space="preserve", which ensures processors don't normalize
those line breaks. Stating that other white space is not
significant seems incompatible with the definition of
xml:space in the XML specification itself:
> The value "default" signals that
applications' default white-space processing modes are
acceptable for this element; the value "preserve"
indicates the intent that applications preserve all the
white space.
https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#sec-white-space
Based on that definition, and the fact that we
don't want to break any global XML rules, I think all white
space in the <lines> element has to be significant. The
broader XML behavior for that attribute is definitely the
behavior that my customers expected (thus the defect report).
This seems like something to address as we make
progress on DITA 2.0, but I wanted to raise it to the broader
TC first.
Cheers -
Robert D. Anderson
DITA-OT lead and Co-editor DITA 1.3
specification
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