Re: [xwiki-devs] [Rendering 2.0][Vote] About whitespace management in list item context

On Dec 17, 2008, at 12:57 PM, Lucien PEREIRA wrote: > Hi, > > Working on annotation feature, I need to retrieve > xwiki document source code from a selection on XHTML. > > This requires to have a correspondence between content > typed by user and content that appears in html. > > I noticed in xwiki 2.0 synthax that white spaces typed > in a list item context are ignored : > > *< > space >> > < > space >> < >> space >>> <space><space>foo<space><space><space>bar<space><space><space> > > renders in XHTML > > <li>foo<space>&nbsp;&nbsp;bar&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</li> > > so I could not determine the real offset of selection in xwiki > document source. There's another problem: leading spaces before list items and headers. We need to allow them (for several reasons, one of them is for supporting indenting velocity code when we have velocity mixed with wiki syntax). So in term of rendering they should be considered as a ListItemBlock and the spaces should not be rendered. One problem is when we go through the wysiwyg these spaces will be removed. Removing them for content not in macros is not such a big deal IMO (except for Lucien's use case but there are other ways of doing it for him). Removing them would be a problem when inside macros. Fortunately we don't touch at macro content for the moment. > This can be solved by not ignoring spaces so render become : > > < > li >> > &nbsp > ;&nbsp > ;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;foo<space>&nbsp;&nbsp;bar&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</ > li> > > This policy of rendering already exists in underline or italic > context so it's strange to have a different behaviour in list > item context. > > Moreover I think we should not suppose what content is > relevant for user or not, so source shouldn't be altered. We have to alter source in the case of badly formed content, as in "**bold". We also later for unisignificant escapes (as with "~hello"' is transformed into "hello") + some other use cases probably. Right now I don't have any idea of what to do differently. Only idea I could think of would be to have a parameter for list items and headers, passing to them the number of leading spaces, tabs, etc but I don't like this too much. I think the idea of leaving the content intact is not correct and we shouldn't expect that behavior for a wiki syntax. A wiki syntax needs to be as simple as possible for users to use. Allowing leading spaces go in that direction. OTOH I agree with Lucien that we've decided to make spaces in paragraph significant so it's not fully consistent. What do others think?