> I can't find the beginning of this thread (a jump from email?), but in
I think it floated in from www-html...
[...]
> Speaking only for myself now, I agree with Murray that the user agent
> should respect white space between the <LI> tag and subsequent text.
> I would go even further and say that I think that it should respect
> leading white space in paragraphs. But the important thing is that
> the behavior should be clearly specified one way or the other.
I would prefer that this be left as a "quality of implementation"
issue, but if it's to be specified at all, I would go the other way:
initial whitestuff in block-level elements should be ignored.
This is preferable esthetically -- a single word space at the
beginning of a paragraph (as opposed to a flush-left margin
or an indented first line) looks funny -- and it helps
protect against irregularities in the markup.
LaTeX goes to great pains to make sure that initial
whitespace in list items is discarded (and if you examine
the code for the \list and \item macros, "pain" is
definitely the right word :-); this seems like the
right approach to me.
For those cases where initial whitespace really is
desired (I can't think of any offhand), perhaps
could be pressed into service?
--Joe English
joe@art.com