Re: Use tabs rather than a series of (wasteful) spaces

I am wondering why people should even spend time discussing such minor
lexical details ?!? ...

No matter how indented or not a document is, and what whitespace characters
were used, most editing tools can format it to a well indented form.

Why should we care about this?

Thanks,
Dimitre

P.S. Why worry about the size of the whitespace if any HTTP 1+ response by
default is gzipped? Probably the only time the (compressed) size matters is
when sending the document over the network.

On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 11:38 AM Roger L Costello <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> Consider this XML document
>
> <Document>
>         <Greeting>Hello, world</Greeting>
> </Document>
>
> There is a single newline character following <Document>
> There is a single tab character preceding <Greeting>
>
> By using the tab character, the XML document is only 48 characters.
>
> If I had used the equivalent number of spaces to indent, the XML document
> would be larger, 55 characters.
>
> By using tabs consistently throughout my XML documents, I gain three
> benefits:
>
> 1. The XML is in a standardized form, which makes it easier to write
> programs that talk and work together.
> 2. The XML documents are smaller, as they have no wasteful embedded blanks.
> 3. Typing is faster.
>
> You might object, "What if I feed the XML document into, say, a printer
> device that doesn't allow tabs?" Answer: simply write a detab tool that
> converts tabs to spaces.
>
> Note that many tools automatically detab text files. For example, the
> "more" tool automatically detabs.
>
> more document.xml | printer-device
>
> Comments?
>
> /Roger
>
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-- 
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
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