- From: Chris Lilley <Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr>
- Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 17:13:55 +0200
- To: preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece)
- Cc: Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl, elm@arbortext.com, fahrner@pobox.com, cpj1@winternet.com, papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca, www-style@w3.org, reddik@thegroup.net
Scott E. Preece writes:
> I wouldn't mind the above interpretation being correct, but I'm not sure
> the two standards taken together read unambiguously on what the result
> would be. One could argue that the definition of the PRE element
> requires the spacing to be uniform, regardless of the font and the
> correct rendering of your example would use characters from the serif
> font, but mono-spaced.
Not the way I read it:
" The PRE element represents a character cell block of text and is
suitable for text that has been formatted for a monospaced font." [1]
Suitable for, not requires or mandates. Putting a style attribute on a
PRE element clearly indicates that the default rendering is to be
modified in some way. It appears that the phrasing also indicates the
properties of text which has already beeen laid out and then imported,
not the rendering of the resulting HTML element.
" Within preformatted text:
- Line breaks within the text are rendered as a move to the
beginning of the next line.
- Anchor elements and phrase markup may be used. (16)
- Elements that define paragraph formatting (headings, address,
etc.) must not be used.
- The horizontal tab character (code position 9 in the HTML
document character set) must be interpreted as the smallest
positive nonzero number of spaces which will leave the number
of characters so far on the line as a multiple of 8. Documents
should not contain tab characters, as they are not supported
consistently. "
What this doesn't say is that columns which line up in the source
should line up in the rendered version; while this is clearly a
desirable default, over-riding it for specific effects seems ok.
You are wise to call attention to possible disparities between
HTML 2.0 and CSS, which should be carefully checked; in this instance
however I think there is no conflict.
[1] http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/html2.0/html-spec_5.html#SEC36
--
Chris
Received on Wednesday, 3 July 1996 11:14:47 UTC