Re: Spaces and Tabs in HTML documents

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Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Message-id: <9306161555.AA09124@austin.BSDI.COM>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Spaces and Tabs in HTML documents 
In-Reply-To: Tim Berners-Lee's message of Wed, 16 Jun 93 09:42:22 +0200.
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Reply-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Organization: Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1993 10:55:13 -0500
From: Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>

>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. 
> 
> 	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.
This can be solved in the browser (either by forcing a fixed width
or by computing the tabs by look ahead within the element).

> 	Now we have tables.  And when we have tables, we will need
Yes, tables might actually solve most of the problem.

I was just offering a different way to think about the problem, which is
that we don't have to choose whether whitespace is significant or not, if
we need it to be significant just add an element that does what we need.

I vote that by default whitespace not be significant, as several people
have already argued for better than I could.

--sanders