Re: IMG in PRE? -Reply

On Mon, 13 May 1996, Charles Peyton Taylor wrote:

> >>> Keith Instone <instone@cs.bgsu.edu> 05/12/96 09:57am >>>
> >With HTML 3.2 being ironed out, is it time to allow IMG in PRE?
> >I read the discussion on www-html from back in January on this
> >topic and still do not see a good reason to exclude IMG from
> >within PRE.
>
> I remember this conversation, and I remember Abigail
> pointing out what was wrong with it.
>
> >Dan Connolly admits it might have just been an oversight a long
> >time ago. Lots of people have found good uses for IMG in PRE. Why
> >not make it officially valid?
>
> Because it doesn't work.
>
> <pre> only works with text, because different hardware
> display images at different relative sizes.   For example,
> you might have an image that is nothing but blank space at
> the beginning of a line, and in your document it would look
> like this in one browser:
>

Your answer is only half right. IMGs work fine in PRE areas _as long as
the images are all exactly the same size (or are isolated from the text)
and you don't implicitly assume a specific font size for the text_. I was
doing 'pseudo-tables' this way a year and half ago with imbedded images.
Worked fine in everything from lynx to AOL to Netscape to Arena. Now that
TABLEs are actually implemented in nearly all browsers to a minimal
functional level, I don't do it. AOLs currently deployed browser and lynx
are simply not worth the extra coding effort as the only major browsers
that *can't* do tables yet.

Dan - isn't it time to retire the 'Graceful Transition' paper on tables?
The transition (as ungraceful as it was in practice) is for all intents
and purposes done.

--
Benjamin Franz

Received on Monday, 13 May 1996 16:59:59 UTC