What I meant by the phrase is that when you see
<a>
<b/>
</a>
there is nothing within the document itself to tell you whether the whitespace is significant; you typically need external information (e.g. a schema or DTD, or just outside knowledge) to know.
One can envisage other notations that make such a distinction: e.g. if all significant text appeared within chevrons, it would be
<a>
<b/>
</a>
versus
<a>«
»<b/>«
»</a>
Michael Kay
> On 13 Sep 2017, at 12:33, Costello, Roger L. <> wrote:
>
> Michael Kay wrote:
>
>> significant and insignificant whitespace
>> can't be lexically distinguished.
>
> What does that mean?
>
> What does it mean to "lexically distinguish" significant and insignificant whitespace?
>
> /Roger
>
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