Re: HTML 4.01 and 5.0: is it somewhat "unspecific" about space characters

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 8:48 AM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 29 Mar 2008 12:37:52 -0700, Kenneth Kin Lum
> <kenneth.kin.lum@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have tested the following in IE 7.0.6001.18000, Firefox 2.0.0.13,
> > Safari
> > 3.1, and Opera 9.26
> >
> > <div>hello world</div>
> >
> > <div> hello world </div>
> >
> > <div><span> hello world </span></div>
> >
> > <div><span>
> >        hello world
> > </span></div>
> >
> > The final rendering in all the modern browsers are the same.
>
> That's because defines them to be the same. This has nothing to do with
> HTML. HTML just impacts the DOM. If you look through the DOM you'll see
> that in most user agents (IE has some issues there) the whitespace will be
> there. You can make this visible on screen by setting white-space:pre or
> equivalent on the element in question.
>
> hm... so you mean HTML take all spaces to be the content... and then... it
is CSS that decides to drop them?   So without using <pre>, is there a way
that you could intentionally or accidentally expose the spaces by defining
user defined styles?   I hope I am not trying to be critical here.  It was
that I thought the presence of space vs the absense of space does make a
difference in the final presentation.