- From: Charles Reitzel <creitzel@rcn.com>
- Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 10:39:02 -0400
- To: Fred.Bone@dial.pipex.com
- Cc: html-tidy@w3.org
Hi Fred, Good to see you there. Well, "usually" is the bread and butter of Tidy. I mean, you're right. There are no guarantees (apparently). But we do try to follow the principle of "interoperable compliance with the least surprise". Also, there is an option for tab-size (in chars), so you can always tweak it to your liking. Agree about the worms. I am hesitant to map <br> to \n and not do anything about all the other markup allowed in <pre> that will still mess up the layout. take it easy, Charlie At 10:25 AM 10/10/2002 +0100, you wrote: >On 9 Oct 2002 at 17:49, Charles Reitzel wrote: > >[...] > > The input has lots of tabs and _no_ newlines. So a) I think the code is > not > > adding the right number of spaces > >The point is, surely, that there *is no* "right number of spaces". >Tabs should not be used inside PRE, precisely because there is no way >to tell the rendering system what the tab boundaries are. > >If I code ><pre> >\t\tText > \t More text ></pre> >then I have no right to make assumptions about how the two pieces of >text will line up: it depends on the tab stops, which are undefined >(and not definable). If both IE and NS have the same defaults as my >editor, that's luck. > >HTML4.01 section 9.3.4 last para: > > The horizontal tab character (decimal 9 in [ISO10646] and [ISO88591] ) > > is usually interpreted by visual user agents as the smallest non-zero > > number of spaces necessary to line characters up along tab stops that > > are every 8 characters. We strongly discourage using horizontal tabs > > in preformatted text since it is common practice, when editing, to set > > the tab-spacing to other values, leading to misaligned documents. > >"Usually", not "required to be". > >Mapping <br> to \n is of course another can of worms altogether.
Received on Thursday, 10 October 2002 12:51:28 UTC