Can updates/obsoletes contain whitespace?

[martinthomson]

The updates and obsoletes attributes on the <rfc> element are defined as follows:

A comma-separated list of RFC numbers or Internet-Draft names.

However, in practice, this has been implemented to allow whitespace. The specification should say that.

A further wrinkle though: we need to be very careful about what "whitespace" means. RFC 8996 includes several Unicode zero-width space characters (U+200b) in this attribute. That is technically whitespace, but it is not whitespace that python recognizes. Therefore, it is not stripped out by xml2rfc. This is currently causing problems in HTML generation.

[martinthomson]

Oh, I realize that maybe "whitespace" implicitly follows the XML definition of white space, which only includes U+20, U+09, U+0a, and U+0d. That would line up with what python does.

[jrlevine]

updated draft