- From: Alan J. Flavell <flavell@a5.ph.gla.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 20:30:39 +0000 (GMT)
- To: Wendy A Chisholm <wendy@w3.org>
- cc: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
On Wed, 17 Nov 1999, Wendy A Chisholm wrote: > The HTML 4 spec doesn't say much about from what i can find. What it _does_ say, though, makes it clear that nbsp does not count as "white space", and is therefore not subject to the rules that pertain to white space. [It may be noted in passing that this is a change from what had been proposed in the never-completed HTML3.0 draft, where, aside from its non-breaking property, the no-break space was stated to be otherwise "white" space.] Clearly, the specification cannot go into detail about the visual rendering (indeed, it explicitly states that it does not prescribe the rendering of any kind of space, apart from what it says about "white space"): how could it, if it intends to address rendering also into non-visual formats? > I'm looking to see if character entities used as values of > attributes are discussed anywhere... Attribute value strings are entirely open to the use of any of the three valid representations of a character in HTML: the named character entity, the numerical character reference per its Unicode value, or the raw coded character per the advertised "charset" value. While it's true that some early browsers got this wrong, this now does not seem to be a problem in practice. I don't see any real problem with the no-break space in this regard. Surely the practical situation is something like this scenario. If two words are separated by an image (say, some kind of logo), that the author considers would best be rendered by an inter-word space in the absence of an image display, then ALT=" " (or ALT=" ") now seems to be the best compromise. I used to put ALT=" ", and got the desired results, but this now seems to be in doubt on theoretical grounds because of the clause about removing leading or trailing _white_ space. I'm sorry, this was a lot of verbiage about a single character - whose display, beyond occupying space, is not visible! best regards
Received on Wednesday, 17 November 1999 15:30:47 UTC