# Serializer changes

There has been some internal reorganization of the serializer, mainly to perform the various processing steps in the order defined in the W3C specification. One effect is to ensure, as required by the specification, that character maps are not applied to attributes affected by URI escaping in the HTML and XHTML output methods. There are other minor effects on corner cases, for example when Unicode normalization and character maps are used in conjunction.

In the XML serializer, comments and processing instructions are now indented when indentation is requested. Indentation of comments and PIs is now aligned better with the spec; for example the spec does not allow whitespace to be added between a comment and an adjacent text node. In addition, the serializer now tries harder to avoid adding indentation whitespace if there is already suitable whitespace present in the result tree.

If the `method` attribute of `xsl:result-document` is not specified, Saxon now attempts to determine the method to use at compile time when possible - specifically, when the first child of the `xsl:result-document` element is a literal result element.

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