Re: Collapsing breaks & non-beaking spaces.

In article <Pine.SOL.3.95q.970714114525.9852C-100000@wronski.math.uwaterloo.ca>,
"Russell Steven Shawn O'Connor" <roconnor@wronski.math.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> No one has mentioned the purpose of collapsing whitespace to begin with.
> Why do we collapse whitespace?  I don't have an offical answer, but I'd
> guess it is done so that Authors can format the HTML SOURCE in such a way
> so that it is readable.  

I thought it was to allow a browser to format the document according
to the current window / rendering device. This goes especially for
newlines, but I think it's valid for normal spaces too. But you could
very well be right - it does make it easier to write readable HTML
source if you know whitespace will collapse.

Strangely enough, I can't find anything in RFC 1866 that explicitly
states that multiple spaces *are* collapsed, only that a newline is
a word space.

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Received on Monday, 14 July 1997 14:56:37 UTC