1.6    White-Space Processing and EOL Handling

In conformance with the W3C XML specification [XML1.0], optional white-space characters that are contained in elements that have element content (in other words that must contain elements only but not text) are ignored. This applies to the following white-space and end-of-line (EOL) [UNICODE] characters:

�        HORIZONTAL TABULATION (0x0009)

�        LINE FEED (0x000A)

�        CARRIAGE RETURN (0x000D)

�        SPACE (0x0020)

For any other element, white-spaces are preserved by default. Unless otherwise stated, there is no special processing for any of the four white-space characters. For some elements, different white-space processing may take place, for example the paragraph element.

The XML specification also requires that any of the four white-space characters that is contained in an attribute value is normalized to a SPACE character.

One of the following characters may be used to represent line ends:

�        LINE FEED

�        CARRIAGE RETURN

�        The sequence of the characters CARRIAGE RETURN and LINE FEED

Conforming to the XML specification, all the possible line ends are normalized to a single LINE FEED character.

As a consequence of the white-space and EOL processing rules, any CARRIAGE RETURN characters that are contained either in the text content of an element or in an attribute value must be encoded by the character entity 
. The same applies to the HORIZONTAL TABULATION and LINE FEED characters if they are contained in an attribute value.