RE: [office-comment] Yet more whitespace (ODF all version)

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

Michael hi

> this mailing list is reserved for feedback to the OpenDocument TC,
> while
> your comment is regarding a specific implementation.

Sorry, I didn't mean to make this implementation-specific, but mentioned
that more in passing ....
 
> So, if you think that a specific implementation contains a bug, then I
> would like to ask you to provide that feedback to the implementors of
> that product.
> 
> In case of OpenOffice.org, the correct action would be to submit an
> issue. See http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/pre_submission.html
> 
> (Speaking as an OO developer, I would also be glad to receive a bug
> document, because I could not reproduce the behavior you are
> describing.)

Let me re-state my confusion and see if there's an explanation...

The spec says "If the paragraph element or any of its child elements
contains white-space characters, they are collapsed."

So, by this logic,

<text:p><text:span> </text:span> <text:span> </text:span></text:p>

Becomes

<text:p/>

Yes?

So opening a document containing the first thing and re-saving will
perform that transformation, I guess.

But more deeply-nested whitespace (i.e. in descendant, not "child"
elements) will *not* have their whitespace collapsed, right? This seems
very odd to me. So, a span inside a span has different collapse rules
than the outer span?

My confusion also arose from the implication here that paragraphs could
not contain leading and trailing whitespace, so that, if we open a word
processor and type " Hello World" (leading space), save and re-load,
that space will be gone. In fact the application I just happened to use
(OO.o 1.1.5 on this machine) converted that leading space to <text:s>
... if that is expected behaviour it probably needs to be mentioned
here, as it's a kind of variation on the collapsing rule.

- Alex.