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

On Sun, 30 Mar 2008 12:57:48 -0700, Kenneth Kin Lum  
<kenneth.kin.lum@gmail.com> wrote:
> It does feel a little different from the idea that HTML is the "content"  
> and CSS is the "presentation", because if CSS decides whether the white  
> spaces that an author put in the HTML file get rendered or not, then it  
> seems like the CSS is deciding on what the content is too, as whitespace  
> characters can also be considered part of the content.

CSS can also decide that an entire element is not rendered using  
display:none.


>> More or less, yes. You'd have to read the parsing algorithm in HTML5 to
>> get the exact details.
>
> I think one thing is that in the HTML 4.01 spec, it seem to hint at how
> white space can be processed, such as collapsing the white spaces or how  
> it is handled in different languages.  So it may lead to readers  
> thinking that white space is first processed in the HTML layer to decide
> whether whitespaces get stored in the parsed result, even before the CSS
> layer can touch it.   Could the HTML spec state that white space  
> processing
> is not done at all in the HTML layer, that all white spaces is retained  
> in the parsed result (in the DOM tree?).

This is already done in the "Parsing HTML Documents" section.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Monday, 31 March 2008 15:45:14 UTC