word separators (was: Ignoring empty paragraphs)

Dan Connolly a écrit :

> But examining the formalities... that is a paragraph with exactly
> one word in it. The HTML definition of a word is not impacted
> by stylesheets:
> 
>         "For all HTML elements except PRE, sequences of white space separate
>         "words" (we use  the term "word" here to mean "sequences of non-white
>         space characters"). When formatting text, user agents should identify
>         these words and lay them out according to the
>         conventions of the particular written language (script) and
> target medium."
>         --
> http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/struct/text.html#h-9.1

Just FYI and information of the other readers : one of my best friends is
a latinist. He had to put on an intranet some weeks ago the exact copy of
a romanian wall inscription where words are separated by a colon.
Not by whitespaces. It means that the common formatting algos in browsers
don't work and he *has* to insert whitespaces in that quotation. It also
means that a copy/paste of the quotation is incorrect. I told him that
some useful whitespaces are not so important ; he became red and explained
me during ten minutes that the original text has no space and Science (with
a big S) needs to show/print the text as it stands on the romanian wall.

I have raised this issue some time ago. Sometimes, document providers need
to specify, on a per-element basis, which char should be interpretated as
a word separator.

> Bit I'd like to discourage authors from relying on <p><p><p>
> to skootch their text down a little bit.

Yes, of course. But that's not enough ; they still can write
<br><br><br>, which is IMHO ugly too...

</Daniel>

Received on Friday, 14 April 2000 06:07:30 UTC