[EMAIL PROTECTED] (ewitness - Ben Fowler) wrote: [snip] > I don't mind admitting that as an outsider to the XML standard, this > looks like a bad, even a really bad, idea. > > My reading of your commentary is "Whitespace is sometimes respected, > and only a langauge lawyer can tell you when".
Well, in some sense you are right, there are a lot of "really bad ideas" hidden in this area. However, you have to see this in context. A *real* typesetter doesn't care about whitespace and line feeds, he thinks in paragraphs and columns and pages of flowing text, with various indentations and margins and such. TeX was practically written to support this view, and this is the default how FO processors work. The problem: not everybody is a typesetter, many people don't even know about how to set indents and hanging indents and margins and this stuff, but they have a space and an enter key sitting squarely on their keyboard. The correct way to express procedure foo(); begin dostuff:=false; end would be something like: <fo:block> <fo:block>foo();</fo:block> <fo:block margin-left="1em"> <fo:block>begin</fo:block> <fo:block margin-left="2em"> <fo:block>dostuff:=false;</fo:block> </fo:block> <fo:block>end</fo:block> </fo:block> </fo:block> but chances are you'll get it space- or even (shudder!) tab-indented. (Take a postal address block for another, less IT-related example) [If i'd get a chance to correct the past, i probably kill the inventor of the tab character before he commits his crime :-] There is a lot of whitespace formatted data out there, and it is unlikely to disappear in the near future. In order to deal with realities, you can fine-tune how FO processors handle various forms of white space. Actually, it is encouraged to do so only locally. You might have noted that in HTML+CSS <br> actually *is* redundant, it is just heavily (ab)used because it produces predictable results without fumbling with gnarly CSS settings. Especially if you have to bring already whitespace formatted data online *quickly*. Typewriter habits are hard to get rid of, regardless how enraged professionals are about this. Regards J.Pietschmann --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
