Peter, Gerrit and XSL-List,
On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 4:49 AM, Flynn, Peter pflynn(_at_)ucc(_dot_)ie
<xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 06/03/17 21:24, Liam R. E. Quin liam(_at_)w3(_dot_)org wrote:
On Mon, 2017-03-06 at 14:11 +0000, Imsieke, Gerrit, le-tex
gerrit(_dot_)imsieke(_at_)le-tex(_dot_)de wrote:
Over the weekend I’ve been writing a whitespace normalization
stylesheet
Sounds like you could wrestle a Balisage paper out of this, if you're
willing to travel to the USA....
The topic is certainly interesting. The whole white-space thang
continues to cause users problems, and this is just one of several
issues. Great to see it being tackled like this.
Yeah. Whitespace problems will never go away. Whitespace is the last
contested territory between "text", "markup" and line noise.
Whenever someone says something isn't supposed to matter, we can know
we are in trouble. If something isn't supposed to matter, that means
we may be tasked with the responsibility of knowing when it doesn't
matter, and when it actually does, and why.
So it is with whitespace. Sometimes it is "merely cosmetic". Sometimes
it is everything. But even when it is everything it isn't everything
in the same way. (Not all calligrams are ASCII art.)
A related issue is moving punctuation out of nested elements.
A related one that recurs in tech doc aimed at reuse is the application
of terminal punctuation in list items. Conventionally, items end with a
semicolon except for the final one which ends with a fullpoint. But for
the content to be reusable without manual editing, the punctuation is
often generated by the processing application (eg XSLT), so writers and
editors may have the convention of not adding any whan writing. Long
items, though, may have their own integral punctuation (eg terminating
fullpoint) for other reasons, so any detection routine needs to look at
the final non-whitespace character and preserve it if it is punctuation,
otherwise apply the relevant generated punctuation (or whatever the
business rules say — increasingly I see short list items left without
any terminating punctuation).
Lots of these bobbles...
Yes indeed, why I like to say information is fractal. No matter how
fine we get, there is always a raggedy edge.
Cheers, Wendell
--
Wendell Piez | http://www.wendellpiez.com
XML | XSLT | electronic publishing
Eat Your Vegetables
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