White-Space Processing (ODF all versions)

["Alex Brown" <alexb@griffinbrown.co.uk>]

Dear all,

Section 1.5 (ODF 1.2) contains the paragraph:

"Any CARRIAGE RETURN characters that are contained either in the text
content of an element or in an attribute value must be encoded by the
character entity 
. HORIZONTAL TABULATION and LINE FEED characters
in attribute values must be encoded by the character entity 
."

And the Ed. Note:

"Ed. Note: Do we really want to require use of 
 as a "character
entity" or do we mean to say a single carriage return character,
whatever its representation?"

Some questions/observations:

- does this apply to all elements/attributes, or only those declared in
the ODF schema?

- the phrase "numeric character reference" is more idiomatic than
"character entity".

- why must "HORIZONTAL TABULATION and LINE FEED characters" be
incorrectly represented by a character reference to the CARRIAGE RETURN
character?

- why is it necessary to encode any whitespace char in "the text content
of an element"? According to my reading of the XML Rec, all such
whitespace is passed through verbatim in any case.

- is a decimal as well as a hexadecimal representation permitted?

- in *attribute* values, it is necessary for document producers to use a
numeric character reference to indicate a CARRIAGE RETURN that should
not be normalized according to the usual XML attribute value
normalisation rules. However, should a conformant ODF producer interpret
*all* such characters as necessarily needing to be represented lexically
by character references in emitted ODF documents?

- the word "must" is used incorrectly in this para.



- Alex.