[osis-core] whitespace

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Todd,
	I (surprise) disagree with you on a few points.  First, suppressing 
whitespace is not equivalent to a 'higher standard of quality'.  And 
second, There may be REAMS of work that I WILL NEVER go back and format 
richly, but want to store as a valid OSIS document.  And Thirdly, no one 
has addressed the issues that I have brought up about what CAN'T be 
marked up in OSIS yet regarding whitespace.

What if I WANT to use proper grammar and have 2 spaces after my 
sentences?  What if I WANT a return after something, like:

Here is my website:

http://www.crosswire.org

Or here is a conversation I had online with PDurusau last night, to quote:

"1:55 PDurusau: XML is a SILLY, and P O O R L Y   C O N T R I V E D, 
mechanism for plain document markup!"



There has to be a limit as to what you are willing to strip in respect 
to whitespace.  We use it all the time. and in HTML, they preserve it 
with: &nbsp; and <br/>.

At the risk of forcing everyone to pollute their documents with 
ill-chosen and irresponsible <p> tags to get the formatting they want, I 
feel we need to address the whitespace issue.

	-Troy.







> It seems the concept you are wrestling with is how to preserve the white
> space, indentation, and line breaks in a text element.  I think the best
> answer is to preserve the meaning by replacing the presentation related
> information (white space, indentation, and line breaks) with markup.
> 
> It also seems that you may be trying to find a balancing point between
> manually encoded/edited richly marked up documents and auto-generated
> documents from source texts that do not provide all the necessary
> information to generate high value markup.
> 
> I think in the END the cost will be lower if we retain a high standard
> of quality.  
> 
> Todd
> 
> 
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: osis-core-admin@bibletechnologieswg.org [mailto:osis-core-
>>admin@bibletechnologieswg.org] On Behalf Of Troy A. Griffitts
>>Sent: Friday, August 08, 2003 2:56 AM
>>To: osis-core@bibletechnologieswg.org
>>Subject: Re: [osis-core] whitespace
>>
>>
>>>Realizing that I probably hold the minority position, ;-), I would
>>>recommend normalizing as part of the application (note not the XML
>>>parser), all the white space in your example to single spaces.
>>
>>no, no; I know of at least one other that might agree with you.
>>
>>
>>>Reasoning is that users should be using markup and stylesheets on
> 
> markup
> 
>>>documents to achieve meaningful presentation. That is not to say
> 
> that I
> 
>>>don't do the same thing in text files while I am taking notes at
>>>meetings, but I don't use it in markup documents I produce for
> 
> meeting
> 
>>>reports.
>>
>>Right, but when initially converting a large document to OSIS, what is
>>the "OSIS entry cost"?
>>
>>How do you handle stuff like double-space between sentences?  &nbsp;
>>isn't an XML escape is it?
>>
>>
>>How about:
>>
>>this is an example
>>
>>(I was going to write an example, but decided my own email is a great
>>example.  I wanted a return after 'How about:'
>>
>>I think there are many ways people use returns and other whitespace in
>>writing and I'm hesitant to say that it is acceptable to strip all
>>whitespace throughout the entire document.
>>
>>
>>>
>>>>(I DON'T WANT RECOMMENDATION ON HOW THIS _SHOULD_ BE MARKED UP)
>>>>
>>>
>>>My, my, has someone been offering unsolicited markup advice? :-)
>>
>>No, no!  Just wanted to keep us on track with the question at hand.  I
>>could probably guess the appropriate way to encode the excerpt and
>>didn't want us to started talking about that.
>>
>>
>>
>>>Hope you are having a great day!
>>
>>Yeah, what are you doing up at 1:55am?  Probably traveling again.
>>
>>	-Troy.
>>
>>
>>
>>>Patrick
>>>
>>>
>>>>I'm looking for input on how to handle whitespace.
>>>>
>>>>    Thanks for your time.
>>>>
>>>>        -Troy.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
>>>
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> 
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