CSS2.1: \A and white-space

I was flipping through CSS2.1, and I came across the passage about \A - 

http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-CSS21-20020802/generate.html#content :
   #  Authors may include newlines in the generated content
   #  by writing the "\A" escape sequence... This inserts a
   #  forced line break, similar to the BR element in HTML.

A while ago, Boris Zbarksy wrote
  | Wouldn't you need to also set white-space:pre to get things like
  | \A to render? I think \A puts a newline character in the text, but
  | after that the text is laid out the way any text with a newline
  | would be and the whitespace (including newlines) is collapsed into
  | just spaces.

Which makes sense and is how Mozilla implements the 'content' property.
After all, \A is just an escape sequence that means "newline". CSS2.1,
however, seems to override that expectation with the wording of its \A
explanation and the following example.

~fantasai

Received on Friday, 23 August 2002 08:51:42 UTC