On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 9:15 AM, Abel Braaksma
<abel(_dot_)online(_at_)xs4all(_dot_)nl> wrote:
Hi Philip,
Not sure whether this makes sense for your use case, but when considering
white space in XSLT, you should also consider that the XSLT can be used as
input document for the same or other XSLT as well. This is not uncommon.
And, of course, any XSLT can contain XML segments not related to XSLT which
may fall under the same rules as normal XML when it comes to white space
significance.
There's certainly some complexity here that I need to consider/test
fully. Michael Kay's XSLT Programmers Reference (4th edition) has 9
pages dedicated to whitespace handling, beginning with:
"Whitespace handling can be a source of considerable confusion."
So there are challenges to say the least. On XML Segments: The concept
provides generic XML editing capabilties, there's just special
consideration when trimming XSLT instructions.
Keeping into consideration that the XSLT file should be treated as if it
were any ordinary input XML (or worse, input text document, heaven forbid!)
with all its quirks might make whitespace handling harder than it first
seems when just looking at the XSLT itself.
Seen as an input text document (perhaps by a diff tool) there are
issues that have workarounds (such as reinserted trimmed formatting at
a later stage), but they're issues nonetheless. For XML-aware handling
I'm hopeful that things will be more manageable, because whitespace
issues are anticipated by XML systems and they have more context when
they encounter whitespace.
Phil fearon
http://qutoric.com
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