RE: MSXML Whitespace handling

[Andrew Kimball <akimball at microsoft dot com>]

Mike,

There are two applications here, the DOM and XSLT.  If using MSXML, the user
must explicitly load the tree into the DOM before passing it to XSLT (it's
not done automatically by XSLT, in which case I would consider your argument
more convincing).  The application responsible for parsing the input XML and
building the tree cache is the DOM, not XSLT.  Therefore, it is perfectly
reasonable to view the DOM as the "application" referred to in the XML 1.0
spec.

As for mangling by default, that is a beef with the design of the MS DOM,
not with the conformance of MS XSL.  The MS DOM defaults towards performance
and low memory consumption, while still staying within the XML 1.0 spec.  I
think it was the right decision for the vast majority of users.  Users who
need to preserve whitespace can always set preserveWhiteSpace=true when
loading the DOM, or use xml:space="preserve" to tag significant whitespace.

~Andy

-----Original Message-----
From: Kay Michael [mailto:Michael.Kay@icl.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2000 1:46 AM
To: 'xsl-list@mulberrytech.com'
Subject: RE: MSXML Whitespace handling


> The spec explicitly does not specify that the XSLT processor must
construct
> the tree.  Furthermore, the input tree may have gone through any number of
> transformations before reaching the XSLT processor.  In the MSXML case,
the
> tree is actually constructed by the MS DOM implementation, in accordance
> with XML 1.0 rules.  These rules state that in the absence of 
> any in-scope xml:space="preserve" elements, the whitespace processing
rules are
> application dependent.

I think this is a little disingenious. On any reasonable interpretation, the
"application" here is XSLT, so in the absence of xml:space="preserve" the
whitespace rules should be those defined by XSLT.

I accept the argument that it is legitimate to allow the user to mangle the
tree before passing it to XSLT, but it seems wrong to mangle it by default.

Mike Kay 


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list