[sc34wg3] Line breaks in CXTM

[sc34wg3@isotopicmaps.org]

Hi,

I agree to Steve's proposal!

Regards,
--Holger


Steve Pepper wrote:
> 
> Kal,
> 
> As you know, Ontopia has implemented CXTM in the Omnigator.
> I have now tried to use it and encountered what I consider to 
> be a serious problem:
> 
> No allowance is made in the spec for non-significant line 
> breaks in the CXTM output. This leads to very long lines 
> indeed. In the extreme case (which is very common) it results 
> in the whole topic map being on one line. As an example, I am 
> attaching the CXTM output from the topic map jill.xtm that is 
> distributed with the Omnigator.
> 
> There are two problems:
> 
> First of all, this output is extremely difficult for a human 
> to read (at least in a non-XML aware editor or viewer) -- and 
> humans *will* have to read these things, e.g. when developing 
> test suites.
> 
> Secondly, the most readily available diff tools (such as Unix
> diff) won't work with such documents because they are line or 
> record oriented. Again this is a great inconvenience which I 
> think is unnecessary.
> 
> I would like therefore to propose that the spec be amended to 
> include the insertion of suitable line breaks. Essentially 
> section 5 should specify the insertion of line feeds such 
> that canonicalization according to XML-C14N would result in a 
> document with line feeds after every end-tag, and also after 
> every start-tag for elements that have element content or are empty.
> 
> Can we agree on this quickly so that both of the current 
> implementations (i.e., yours and ours) can be updated before 
> the Amsterdam meeting?
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Steve
> 
> --
> Steve Pepper <pepper@ontopia.net>
> Chief Strategy Officer, Ontopia
> Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3
> Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps 1.0)
>  
>