Re: DAVENPORT: Indent equivalent for DocBook

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ "Steve Greenland" <greenland@ellipsysconsulting.com> was heard to say:
| Yech. I've thought about it for a few minutes, and I am unable to
| conceive of a reason why making that whitespace significant would
| be a desirable behavior in a markup language (except, of course, for
| elements like <literallayout> where that's the whole point of the
| element).
| 
| So the question, obviously, is "Why?".

Because *ML are markup languages not formatter languages. Spaces
are characters and if you say characters can go here and you put
spaces there, them's characters and they're significant.

SGML has a delightfully impenetrable set of whitespace handling
rules to reduce this problem, but XML took the simple path.

The "obvious" answer, ignoring leading and trailing whitespace
doesn't work.

<para>
it <quote>works</quote> here<emphasis>
but what about this?</emphasis>
</para>

| 
| > <para>I'm now trying to train myself to type like this.
| > </para>
| 
| See? You need an indent-like program -- it would pre-proc your document,
| and format the sgml consistently. :-)

Er, well, maybe, but it would have to be an DTD-aware program, there's no
simple algorithm. Arbortext's ADEPT/Epic products do this very, very well
and a whole host of other very nice things. But I can't say that 'cause
I work for them :-)

                                        Cheers,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | All along the untrodden paths of
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | the future, I can see the
Member, DocBook Editorial Board    | footprints of an unseen hand.--Sir
                                   | Boyle Roche