Jeni's Musings

I use XSLT all the time, and it has particular ways of dealing with whitespace. I happen to think that the way XSLT deals with whitespace is pretty solid,

Note though that XSLT2 and XSLT1 have very different whitespace handling. XSLT1 always passes it along (or at least it passes along whatever the underlying XML parser hasn’t discarded) so it’s under stylesheet control whether to strip or not using xsl:strip-space, XSLT2 (or rather XDM) changes this behaviour so that by default whitespace in (DTD or Schema) specified element content is stripped, this happens before XSLT starts (conceptually) so can’t be controlled by xsl:preserve|strip-space.

David