Tidy Wraps Between an Attribute and its Value: Problem?

Dear Dave Raggett,

I'm disturbed at the way Tidy wraps lines by inserting a space between
an attribute's equal sign and its value. For example, one might see Tidy
wrap as follows:

<a href=
"http://www.mrdata.net/">

Is this a problem? Everywhere I look, I see the HTML specification for
an attribute in the following form: attribute="value"

I haven't yet found any support for the following form: attribute=
"value"

But, that is the form that you are actually using. 

Does this form actually meet the relevant specifications? When going
through some SGML documentation, I saw what looked like some tenuous
support, by way of examples. But, I couldn't find any hard data about
this topic.

More importantly, does this issue cause any HTML based Web browsers some
kind of problem? Personally, when I see whitespace within a tag, and
this whitespace is not within quotation marks, I assume that a new
attribute follows. If there are Web browsers which assume the same
thing, wouldn't it be better to avoid breaking this assumption? Or, at
least, to allow this feature to be optionally turned off?

Please, excuse me for bothering you with this. I've done a reasonable
amount of research on this topic, and have come up empty-handed. There
is no documentation on your Web site of your unusual technique. There is
no way to turn it off. I did try "--wrap-attributes no", just in case,
but this option doesn't apply to the current issue.

Sincerely,
Israel Steinmetz, RingMaster
--
WebRings: Frames Free!, Golden HTML/XHTML Resources, Valid HTML/XHTML
http://www.noframes.org/webrings/

Received on Saturday, 29 April 2000 11:29:32 UTC