From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Aug 11 2003 - 18:14:48 EDT
From: "Jon Hanna" <jon@spin.ie>
> Some of these only apply to elements that do not allow any
> character data apart from whitespace to appear directly within them, and
> hence are not an issue here. Some happen at relatively high level of
> processing, e.g. rendering (not parsing) of HTML, and as such should
> correctly process spaces combined with combining characters.
Here I have to disagree: in XML, the normalization of whitespaces occurs
during parsing before the DOM tree is built, and so the initial whitespaces
are made inaccessible; rendering occurs only later based on the parsed
DOM tree. This is to ensure the equivalence of the encoding under very
strict conditions defined in the XML standard (and retrofitted now in the
HTML standard to mimic the standard practices of HTML 4.01 in
XHTML 1.0 (and now 1.1 with the XHTML modularization).
Strict conformance for the behavior of these whitespaces is mandatory and
cannot be bypassed or negociated, notably when XML data needs to be
certified against alteration, i.e. cryptographically signed. (XML signature
is now standardized), or when the DOM tree is used and altered in a
predictable way with technologies like XPath which needs to refer to
exact encoding position in the encoded Unicode NFC form of text elements,
attribute values, or CDATA sections.
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