Re: Specification Questions

Tim Bray (tbray@textuality.com)
Sat, 02 Aug 1997 12:01:13 -0700


At 09:51 AM 02/08/97 GMT, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
><QUESTION>
>What whitespace characters can be passed to the application? Regardless of
>what is done with it, is CR+LF treated in the same way as LF or CR alone
>in a document?
></QUESTION>

All bytes that are not markup are data, and passed to the application.

Yes, this will be surprising to people who are used to HTML. Too bad -
HTML's behavior is unacceptable for many classes of applications. It
would be surprising to those who understand the 8879 rules, but
experience shows that this group includes only about a dozen people,
and they disagree. The rule given above has the virtue that it is
short, simple, and easily understood by everyone. We spent a lot
of time on this, and it's the only sane way to go. -Tim