Re: Spaces and Tabs in HTML documents

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Date: Wed, 16 Jun 93 09:42:22 +0200
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-id: <9306160742.AA03875@www3.cern.ch>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Spaces and Tabs in HTML documents 
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch, bernd@crnvma.cern.ch
Reply-To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch

>Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1993 23:20:56 -0500
>From: Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>
>
>How about having two <PRE> style tags.  One works just like existing  
<PRE>
>and another tag that (probably) doesn't use the fixed-width font but  
does
>preserves spaces and tabs as much as possible and allows full HTML  
mark-up.
>It will be the task of the browser to make this look good. 


	I am sceptical.   The significance of HT (the character)
	in PRE (the element) is to go to the "next" tab stop
	after the current position.
	If you don't know the relative font sizes, you can't predict
	where you will be, and so what the next stop will be.
	Any tabbing arrangement which allows variable width
	characters must therefore change the significance to
	"go to the left most tab stop you haven't used so far"
	and wrap the text when it reaches a tab stop by itself.
	Now we have tables.  And when we have tables, we will need
	lines in them of various types, and column headings and
	things.  And it will be good but it won't be tabs.


...[...]....
>shooting ourselves in the foot.  SGML bigots are missing the big  
picture,
>99.999% of the existing data *doesn't have* semantic information and  
no
>one gives a shaving cream about it; we just want it online and some  
of us
>would like to access it via hypertext.
...
>--sanders


	Nicely put! :-)
	HTML has to bridge between the 99.999% and rendering-
	free SGML whose justification we also all know.
	
	Tim