Re: CSS2.1: \A and white-space

On 9/5/02 9:33 PM, "fantasai" <fantasai@escape.com> wrote:

> 
> Tantek Çelik wrote:
>> 
>> On 9/5/02 6:02 PM, "fantasai" <fantasai@escape.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> Tantek Çelik wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> br { line-break-after:always }
>>> 
>>> br:after {content: "\A"; white-space: pre} ?
>> 
>> Right, this is exactly the nonsense hack that I am saying there is no need
>> for.  There was no need to introduce "\A" as a "formatting instruction", and
> 
> .... Well, assuming \A gets replaced by a line feed character
> according to the CSS escaping rules [1], I don't see anything
> nonsensical about this example here. White-space is pre, so
> line breaks should be honored.
> 
> Or am I missing something here?

"line feed character" is exactly the problem.  It is a character based
formatting instruction, which is antiquated, and its presence in a CSS
specification (for that matter, a W3C specification) is very bad
anachronism.  Like I said, even the Unicode folks have been getting rid of
all the characters which are simply formatting instructions.

Another example, do you think a tab character \9 should mean move this
content into the next table column?

> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/syndata.html#escaped-characters

the _only_ reason that CSS2 included the "\A = line feed character = break
the line" was so that br could be emulated with :after and content.  As I
said, this was a hack.

Tantek