[uf-dev] Proper use of value

[Manu Sporny]

Michael Kaply wrote:
> I think the RDF situation is very different than the microformats with
> regards to the whitespace problem.
> 
> With microformats, you are adding the microformat classes to existing
> content, so you are
> probably putting them around a lot of various whitespace (carriage
> returns, line feed, etc.)

Hmm... do you mean RDF or RDFa? :)

If you mean RDF, then yes I agree - the two situations are very
different. If you mean RDFa, then I don't agree as insertion of RDFa and
Microformats into pre-existing XHTML is done in more-or-less the same way.

The majority of the RDFa use cases have RDFa added to existing XHTML web
pages... so I believe the same whitespace issues exist for RDFa as they
do for Microformats.

> I think parsers should definitely remove the whitespace because what we
> are making available should equate to the
> HTML content and the HTML content has whitespace collapsed and removed.

What about PRE tags? Or the use of any CSS 'white-space'[1] style that
isn't 'normal'. This is important in poetry and other pre-formatted text
on the net.

For example:

<span style="white-space: pre-line>
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.
</span>

By stating that uF parsers should remove whitespace, we're unnecessarily
invalidating all of those use cases.

-- manu


[1] http://webdesign.about.com/od/styleproperties/p/blspwhitespace.htm