Re: RE two PREs

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 93 23:23:14 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9306250423.AA12611@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: kchang@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Kenneth Chang)
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: RE two PREs
In-reply-to: <9306250405.AA12428@newton.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
References: <9306250405.AA12428@newton.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
X-Md4-Signature: b95c84ad09ccf099fcc0bf6ccf99d6d2
Kenneth Chang writes:
> >> = Terry
> > = Dave Raggett
> 
> >> Presently in xmosaic PRE is presented in a typewriter font; this is okay
> >> for code examples (unless you have in-line annotations that you want 
> >> distinguished from the code) but not for all forms of text that should
> >> be displayed verbatim (poetry).  So either two PREs are needed, or the
> >> font change in PRE should be invoked specifically, perhaps by using
> >> CODE inside PRE.
> >
> >HTML+ has a style attribute for the PRE tag with just such ideas in mind:
> >
> ><!-- Preformatted text with fixed pitch font,
> >     respecting original spacing and newlines.
> >     The style attribute allows authors to specify
> >     alternative styles, e.g. "poem" which browsers
> >     could render in a proportional font.
> 
> I think Terry's solution of requiring a <CODE> to get a fixed-width
> font within a PRE is simpler and more general. Right now, I come across
> things such as addresses, e.g.
> 
> National Center for Supercomputing Applications
> 405 E. Springfield Avenue
> Champaign, Illinois 61820
> 
> that there really isn't any way to code in HTML sensibly. It certainly
> isn't a poem, either.

A line-break primitive would solve that and keep <pre> pure (the whole
point behind <pre> is that it's preformatted in ASCII and browsers
shouldn't screw around with that formatting; it shouldn't simply mean
"newlines significant").

Marc