RE: [xsl] what I meant by preserving whitespace

[Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>]

Eric,

>linefeed-treatment="preserve"
>white-space-collapse="false"
>wrap-option="no-wrap"

It's good that you found the FO properties that provide for turning off 
whitespace-munging. It's not a tranform problem (as Chris's code showed), 
it's a problem of controlling your target tag set so the application does 
the right thing with it.

To indulge for a moment in markup-theoretical purism: to be completely in 
keeping with the way XML generally wants to look at white space, your 
source would not even contain whitespace that was significant as "data 
content" -- rather, you'd use markup to convey the information that is, in 
some kinds of visual media (such as print), conveyed by space. Accordingly, 
the prosodic features of a poem, for example, that are indicated by white 
space in their print rendition, would in an XML character stream be 
indicated by markup instead, as in

<line indent="double">Imagine this is a poem</line>
<line indent="single">and we want lines idented</line>
<line indent="single">in this strange fasion</line>

and so forth. This is the "clean" way to do it because it separates format 
from content -- downstream (say, in your XSLT) you can provide whatever 
whitespace you need to make it look right. (We could take this further: 
"real" markup of poetry might have even better ways to do it than using 
'indent' attributes, which are actually only recording presentation. Often, 
in poetry, there are deeper structures, such as metrical or stanza 
structures, that drive the rendition and that can be represented through 
markup. But that's another topic.)

Of course, many or most applications aren't going to tolerate the kind of 
tag explosion that you'd get if you tried to do everything this way. Also, 
even this approach fails to get at some far-out cases, such as ASCII art 
(check out people's .sigs), or (say) Python code, where whitespace is 
actually part of the "data".

This is why XML has mandated the syntax for xml:space -- to allow XML 
applications to share a syntactical construct to say "hey, white space 
matters here, hands off". But XSLT leaves its hands off whitespace in text 
nodes anyway. You don't need to "implement" xml:space because it generally 
comes for free.

On the other hand, if you have an application like a web browser, that 
*doesn't* respect whitespace in the source when it puts it on screen (or an 
FO formatter that does helpful line wrapping, etc.), you have to work 
around that based on that application's features and foibles. This is what 
those FO properties are designed for.

Cheers,
Wendell


======================================================================
Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
======================================================================


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