- From: Nir Dagan <nir@nirdagan.com>
- Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 15:35:38 -0500
- To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
At 01:01 PM 11/17/99 -0500, Wendy A Chisholm wrote: >in my previous message I proposed > ><BLOCKQUOTE> >for spacer images, use alt=" ". ></BLOCKQUOTE> > >I just realized I had a bug in the examples. Therefore, I am >considering updating my proposal. I think it would be much better to propose to use stylesheets for spacing control with some decent examples, rather than to bother on the "correct" deprecated/obsolete method to use. It may be pointed out that when using images for spacing, one is restricted to pixel units that are unrelated to the font size, and there is no way to predict how the space will look like when images are turned off (some browsers even insert a rather large and ugly image instead of the "invisible" space) Stylesheets do it better. > >The HTML 4 spec doesn't say much about from what i can find. Other >than it is a "non-breaking space." [1] I don't see any suggestions for >usage. I'm looking to see if character entities used as values of >attributes are discussed anywhere... 1. It was already pointed out that nbsp is not white space in the parsing sense. In particular, the way white space is handled in attribute values is irrelevant for nbsp. 2. Non breaking space means in the typesetting industry a space in which a line break should not occur. E.g., Nir Dagan will result in rendering "Nir Dagan" on one line, rather than "Nir" at the end of one line and "Dagan" at the begining of the next. In other words Nir Dagan is treated as one word when rendered in a medium that has lines. Non-breaking space is not used to control spacing in any typesetting enviroment that I know of, and HTML, although not a typesetting enviroment, doesn't change that. Non breaking space is a "presentation hint" concerning the occurance of a line break. That's all. As far as character entities, they may be used in attribute values defined as CDATA. On the other hand they cannot be used as content of an element whose content is CDATA (such as SCRIPT or STYLE). This is, I think, mentioned somewhere in the spec. (Sorry for not giving reference) Also, using non-breaking space and using character reference are two unrelated issues. In ISO-8859-1 for example non-breaking space can be encoded with the 160-th octet. In addition, any character can be encoded with a character reference in any encoding. There is no significant difference between non-breaking space and the small Latin letter "a" in this respect. Nir. =================================== Nir Dagan Assistant Professor of Economics Brown University Providence, RI USA http://www.nirdagan.com mailto:nir@nirdagan.com tel:+1-401-863-2145
Received on Wednesday, 17 November 1999 15:34:17 UTC