Re: SPaces and Tabs in HTML documents

• Mail folder: WWW Talk Apr-Jun 1993 Archives
• Next message: joe@athena.mit.edu: "Central index of internet resources "
• Previous message: Bill Janssen: "Re: HTML+ support for eqn & Postscript"
• Reply: Robert Mah: "Unsubscribe me"

Message-id: <9306141928.AA15439@dxmint.cern.ch>
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1993 14:27:22 -0600
To: dale@ora.com (Dale Dougherty)
From: cshotton@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu (Chuck Shotton)
Subject: Re: SPaces and Tabs in HTML documents
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch

>I object to collapsing spaces everywhere outside of PRE.
>I agree that coding multiple spaces is not a wise thing
>to do, but I must believe that lacking better solutions,
>we need spaces.

I disagree. White space should be "transparent" because it doesn't mean the
same thing from display to display. What is an 8 character wide tab on a
VT100 turns into some arbitrary chunk of white space on other displays.
What is really needed is some sort of marker like <indent> or <space> with
arguments in some universal unit.

This brings up another white space, namely the question of line ends in
<pre> blocks. What IS the "legal" end of line terminator in HTML? CR/LF? LF
only? Many documents with <pre> sections look great on one client and
horrible on others because of the inconsistent treatment of end of line
characters. 
--_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_\_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
Chuck Shotton                             \ 
Assistant Director, Academic Computing     \   "Are we there yet?"
U. of Texas Health Science Center Houston   \ 
cshotton@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu  (713) 794-5650 \ 
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-\-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-