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

Daniel Beardsmore wrote:

> You don't see explicit space? I see explicit space.

Me too, my question was if you get the same behaviour if there
really is no space.  That would render your chain of arguments
based on the presence of spaces as beside the point.

> However, sometimes you want to set a background on each <li>
> and have them all join to form a solid bar, with padding 
> within the <li> to keep the text apart.

I never wanted to use <ul><li> ... </li></ul> for a purpose
also available with <div><span> ... </span></div> or similar,
because something not working without CSS is IMO broken.  

But apparently you want <ul> to do something that I'd never
consider, and for a HTML5 memo the question could be if what
you want is still an "unnumbered list" or something else.

Or if what you want belongs into a CSS specification, because
without CSS treating list items as "inline" can't happen.

> <ul>
>  <li><a href...>Foo</li><li><a href...>Bar</li><li><a href...>Baz</li>
> </ul>
 
> This makes the HTML very hard to follow after a few list
> items

ACK, if that "works" for what you want, then something is odd
if it doesn't work as soon as you add line breaks.  But this
oddity could be an "implementation detail", below the level
of what a specification can or should do.

A similar case might be href="#".  I expect that to be a nice
shortcut for TOP.  But AFAIK that behaviour is not specified, 
the specification only says that "#" is syntactically valid.

IOW when I find a browser where "#" doesn't do what I want it
is my problem, not a bug in the specification.  If I want to
be sure I've to identify a top explicitly and use href="#top".

 Frank

Received on Monday, 31 March 2008 15:56:40 UTC