On 31 Jan 2019, at 9:25, Hussein Shafie wrote:
On 01/30/2019 05:48 PM, stefan wrote:
On 2019-01-30 11:08 a.m., Gerd Wagner wrote:
In fact, it's the other way around. XXE DOES NOT preserve the
"physical contents" of an XML file, since it deletes my
user-inserted
line break between </p> and <pre> and joins the two lines creating
the
ugly formatting </p><pre>.
I suppose the point is that XXE does not even have a notion of
"physical
contents". It doesn't deal with the underlying byte stream, only with
the XML *info set*.
True.
The rest is hidden within some XML I/O library that
doesn't preserve the state that you are interested in as non-semantic
content.
Yes.
I understand and agree with the above statements. But still, the
following, doesn’t immedatly make sense to me:
We also give the user a few save options related to the "XML
indentation":
7.3. Save options,
http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/doc/help/saveOptions.html
The "XML indentation" options, turned on by default, confirm that XXE
will not preserve the "physical contents" of an XML file.
To bring in some pun and fun: Many think of 'indentation' as
'intentation'. ;-)
The topic we discuss is a little confusing. And for that reason, I would
like to point out some possible sources of (language) confusion:
(1) "Whitespace (preservation)" is not equivalent to "physical contents
(preservation)".
(2) Another possible source of confustion is this:
I do not find anywhere in the above documententation of XXE’s
indentation settings, that XXE will not preserve 'the "physical
contents" of an XML file'. Instead I read "Default: checked." Which
means that XXE, by default, does indent XML code. And in that regard, I
think XXE faces the folloowing communication problem: For many users,
"indentation" is equivalent to "the physical contents get presevered" -
and that in XXE, there is no such link between indentation and
preservation. Which is confusing.
What, exactly, is the role of indentation in XXE? Just as XXE once did
not have a source editor, was there, perhaps, once a time when XXE did
not even perform any indentation?
Ironically, in XXE, the only way to get (I believe) reliable
"indentation" (by which I mean: "code formatting that follows a logical
principle") is by **disabling** indentation .... Because, when one
disables indentation, XXE will format Gerd’s code example according to
the requirements of the "infoset", which means that his example ends up
looking as follows:
follows:</p
><pre
class="role-listing-1"
>SELECT title
The advantage of disabling indentation is that the code formatting
becomes predictable.
However, human beings (almost) never "indent" like that. Clever XML
users are probably usually not even aware of the fact that it is
permitted, by XML, to place whitespace between the "</p" and the ">".
(Some times even editing tools become confused by the whitespace between
the "</p" and the ">".)
What you are asking is to augment XXE to carry the latter
around, too. Right ?
This feature is very unlikely to be implemented in the future.
From partaking in codifying the HTML5 specification, I am used to
solving problems
* EITHER by adding a syntactic feature which fixes the problem
* OR by describing the problem outright in such a way that those who
care are able EITHER live with the problem OR take the necessary steps
to avoid the problem. The necessary steps to avoid the problem typically
include specifying specific ways to use the language, so that problem
does not occur. Such documentation might also include an accurate
description of the way the applicaiton behaves.
Or to put it even simpler: Either add the feature. Or, alternatively,
add good documentation (by which I mean: more than a disclaimer). The
"or" variant is especially useful when the feature is not likely to be
implemented.
And in that regard: XXE is such a good tool, that I think that
documentation of strategies for using XXE together with other tools with
as few problems as possible, would be very useful. How should one
configure XXE for such a task? And how should/could one configure other
tools?
For instance, for use with GIT and CVS, perhaps disabling the
intendeation is exactly what is needed? And/Or perhaps the additional
step of post-indentating XXE’s unindented source code would be needed.
As well as de-indentation, according to XXE’s requirements, when you
want to re-open/re-import the code in XXE. There are many tools out
there for indentation and collapsing source code. Are there any tools
that are very useful when working with XXE?
By the way: When it comes to the issue of preserving the source code,
then - in fact - often, my problem is not so much the way XXE stores its
source code, but rather that (to me) very small changes in an external
editor, can negatively impact the WYSWYG editing in XXE (because empty
lines suddenly appears in the text). More than once have I had to remove
"possibly significant" white-space added by an external editor simply in
order to make XXE’s WYSIWYG interface not display empty lines where I
do not want to see them. How about describing an algorithm for such
re-import? (I guess the algorithm would, amongst other things, have to
say that one should remove whitespace between socalled block elements -
for instance.)
(From my, perhaps, layman’s perspective, whenever I reopen a document
on which I performed som editing in another editor than XXE, the problem
is often rather that XXE preserves too much rather than too little white
space/physical contents.)
--
Leif Halvard Silli
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