Re: proposal for "null" alt-text (was "Re: GL's interpretation of null alt-text")

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 &nbsp; 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 &nbsp; 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&nbsp;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&nbsp;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