Re: Monospaced font

Glenn Adams writes:
 > 
 >     From: Stephen Turner <S.R.E.Turner@statslab.cam.ac.uk>
 >     Date: Fri, 1 Dec 1995 18:10:18 +0000 (GMT)
 > 
 >     In font-family: monospace, are two consecutive spaces in the source
 >     represented by twice as much space in the output (like HTML <pre> but
 >     unlike Netscape <code>)? Should it be defined, or is this too specific
 >     for this spec?
 > 
 > You bring up a good point. CSS1 needs a "verbatim" property indicates that
 > whitespace should not be folded.  This was one of the first things I added
 > in our UA's support of CSS.

`Monospace' is just a generic font family, many formatters will
probably interpret it as `Courier'. It doesn't say anything about
collapsing whitespace and line breaks.

As Glenn says, there should be a `verbatim' property in CSS1. There
will be; the only reason that it isn't there yet is that it would be
the first boolean property in CSS. But if we can't think of a useful
generalization soon it will be `preformatted: yes/no'. (It's not
`verbatim' because (1) `preformatted' is the term HTML writers already
know, and (2) `verbatim' might give the impression that markup is left
uninterpreted, which is impossible.)


Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  bert@w3.org                                  INRIA project RODEO/W3C
  http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/People/Bos/   2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 93 65 77 71                 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Sunday, 3 December 1995 16:21:42 UTC