[osis-core] whitespace PLEASE READ

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Just a disclaimer:

	THE HYPOTHETICAL QUOTE FROM PDURUSAU BELOW IS FICTITIOUS AND WAS MEANT 
AS AN EXAMPLE AND TO POKE FUN.  PDURUSAU HAS NEVER SAID ANYTHING SIMILAR 
TO ME-- OR AT LEAST NOT LAST NIGHT AT 1.55AM :) (FUN / JOKE).

	-Troy.



Troy A. Griffitts wrote:

> 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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