Re: [dita] Issue With Requirement for Trailing Space in class= Values

[Eric Sirois <esirois@ca.ibm.com>]

Hi Eliot,

It looks like the class attributes are
okay as well.   The interesting part is that whitespace is also valid
in an xsd:list.  It would be interesting to see is that XQuery and
XSLT 2.0 processors deal with the leading and trailing whitespace.

Eric

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/CR-xmlschema-2-20001024/#string

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/CR-xmlschema-2-20001024/#dt-whiteSpace

2.4.2.6 whiteSpace

whiteSpace constrains the value space of types derived from string such that the various behaviors specified in Attribute Value Normalization in [XML 1.0 Recommendation (Second Edition)] are realized. The value of whiteSpace must be one of {preserve, replace, collapse}.

preserve
No normalization is done, the value is not changed (this is the behavior required by [XML 1.0 Recommendation (Second Edition)] for element content)
replace
All occurrences of #x9 (tab), #xA (linefeed) and #xD (carriage return) are replaced with #x20 (space)
collapse
After the processing implied by replace, contiguous sequences of #x20's are collapsed to a single #x20, and leading and trailing #x20's are removed.
NOTE: The notation #xA used here (and elsewhere in this specification) represents the Universal Code Set (UCS) code point hexidecimal A (linefeed), which is denoted by U+000A in [Unicode3]. This notation is to be distinguished from &#xA;, which is the XML character reference to that same UCS code point.

whiteSpace is applicable to all atomic and list datatypes. For all atomic datatypes other than string (and types derived by restriction from it) the value of whiteSpace is collapse and cannot be changed by a schema author; for string the value of whiteSpace is preserve; for any type derived by restriction from string the value of whiteSpace can be any of the three legal values. For all datatypes derived by list the value of whiteSpace is collapse and cannot be changed by a schema author. For all datatypes derived by union  whiteSpace does not apply directly; however, the normalization behavior of union types is controlled by the value of whiteSpace on that one of the memberTypes against which the union is successfully validated.

---

Eric A. Sirois
Staff Software Developer 
DB2 Universal Database - Information Development
DITA Migration and Tools Development
IBM Canada Ltd. - Toronto Software Lab
Email: esirois@ca.ibm.com
Phone:(905) 413-2841
Blue
Pages (Internal)

"Transparency and accessibility requirements dictate that public information
and government 
transactions avoid depending on technologies that imply or impose a specific
product or 
platform on businesses or citizens" - EU on XML-based office document
formats.

Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com

03/10/2008 07:44 PM

To	Eliot Kimber <ekimber@reallysi.com>
cc	dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject	Re: [dita] Issue With Requirement for Trailing Space in class= Values

Eliot Kimber <ekimber@reallysi.com> wrote on 08/03/2008 04:42:27
AM:
> In the process of implementing DITA support in our RSuite product,
we 
> discovered that the current version of the MarkLogic XML repository
> strips trailing spaces from attribute values. This of course breaks
all 
> hope of generic DITA processing unless we implement a workaround in
> advance of MarkLogic fixing their bug (which they might refuse to
fix).

This might not be much comfort, but that behaviour is absolutely in contravention
to the XML spec: 
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#AVNormalize
(Interpreting the spec: leading and trailing whitespace must be left as-is
if the attribute is declared as CDATA, which DITA @class is.)

> - Does anyone know of any processors that would break if class= had
a 
> trailing non-blank character. 

DITA-OT's generalization code (generalize-on-conref, as well as the standalone
generalize and respecialize transforms) would probably break.  It
breaks the class string into whitespace-separated bits and assumes that
each of them is a doctype/element pair. 

-- 
Deborah Pickett
Information Architect, Moldflow Pty Ltd, Melbourne
Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com