Whitespace handling in VOTable field description

[Dempsey, James (IM&T, Black Mountain)]

Hi Apps,

I've noticed that topcat and astropy do not agree on how to handle whitespace in a VOTable field description. TOPCAT seems to be correct in that it preserves whitespace, but astropy is outputting a field description as

    <DESCRIPTION>
     1-sigma noise level of the spectrum in opacity units. Does not
     include emission noise.
    </DESCRIPTION>

which is expecting the whitespace to be collapsed (i.e. <xs:whiteSpace value="collapse"/>). Being too used to html I was surprised that the default whitespace rule for XML is 'preserve'.

So, what do people think about changing the VOTable XML schema (and spec) to say the whitespace should be collapsed? If that isn't popular, I'll raise a bug with astropy.

Cheers,
James Dempsey
Senior Developer
Information Services Applications
CSIRO Information Management & Technology (IM&T)
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