Re: Collapsing breaks & non-beaking spaces.

Liam Quinn (liam@htmlhelp.com)
Mon, 14 Jul 1997 18:07:41 -0400 

Message-Id: <3.0.2.32.19970714180741.00899350@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 18:07:41 -0400
To: www-html@w3.org
From: Liam Quinn <liam@htmlhelp.com>
Subject: Re: Collapsing breaks & non-beaking spaces.
In-Reply-To: <199707141541.IAA18480@iceland.it.earthlink.net>

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At 08:41 AM 14/07/97 -0700, David Perrell wrote:
>
>Liam Quinn wrote:
>> I'm sure that was fun...  Now how is declaring the non-breaking space
>as 
>> collapsible different than deprecating elements like FONT?
>
>Current usage of consecutive &nbsp is common. Declaring it as wrong
>immediately renders thousands of pages illegal.

No one is suggesting declaring multiple non-breaking spaces as illegal--
just collapsing.  There's a big difference.  The HTML 4.0 draft recommends 
ignoring empty paragraphs, yet there are thousands of pages that use empty 
paragraphs for spacing (or because of a misunderstanding of which elements 
close paragraphs, e.g., <P><CENTER>Foo</CENTER></P>).

>Since most browsers now
>treat &nbsp as if it were a character, with no special processing, it
>would be better to leave the situation as it is, with no formal
>declaration of 'correct' use, than it would be to declare common usage
>unequivocally wrong.

So what about the empty paragraph thing?

The expired HTML 3.0 draft stated that the non-breaking space "should be 
treated in the same way as the space character (ASCII character code 32 
decimal), except that the user agent should never break lines at this 
point." [1]  I assume there was a reason for making this rather definite 
statement about the behaviour of the non-breaking space.  Perhaps when 
Dave Raggett returns he can offer some insight into this.

[1] http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/html3/specialchars.html

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Liam Quinn
===============  http://www.htmlhelp.com/%7Eliam/  ===============
Web Design Group            Enhanced Designs, Web Site Development
http://www.htmlhelp.com/    http://enhanced-designs.com/
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