Re: <pre>
Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com)
Thu, 6 Oct 1994 19:58:15 +0100
On Thu, 6 Oct 1994, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
> In message <199410061400.KAA13006@eies.njit.edu>, James Whitescarver writes:
> >It is not clear to me that <pre> should ignore CR. I think this is a bug
> >in the our browsers. The intent of <pre> was that such things are NOT
> >ignored. The specs may be wrong too. :)
>
> This issue came up on the HTML Working group list.
>
> The current practice[1] is that the LF character is what matters.
>
> The spec will say that CRLF is the correct way to break a line,
> but it will encourage browser implementors to accept LF alone
> as a linebreak, and caution authors and editor implementors
> that CR alone will _not_ work. (right, Mike?)
It should be noted that people who use desktop publishing software heavily
(Quark, Word, etc.) have it drilled into them to *never* put line breaks at
the end of the sentences, only at the ends of paragraphs. Now, conceptually
asking them to end their lines with a hard break and beginning and ending
paragraphs in <P></P> might not sound too hard to us, but to them it's
like asking them to use a Dvorak keyboard. This actually came up in the
realization by people here that typing long strings into TEXTAREA fields
without line breaks is aesthetically pretty ugly and contrary to what
most people are used to.
Brian