Re: Some complaints about HTML 4.0

At 8:43a -0400 07/14/97, Liam Quinn wrote:
 > At 02:58 PM 14/07/97 +0300, Stephanos Piperoglou wrote:
 > >I'm for non-breaking spaces not collapsing. The correct syllogism is:
 > >
 > >- Only whitespace collapses
 > >- Whitespace is only tabs, spaces and newlines
 > >-   is neither tab, space, or newline.
 > >------------------
 > >Ergo,   doesn't collapse
 >
 > To me this is the most valid argument made.

That's what I meant to write, honest! :)

 > But is there some kind of
 > standard (e.g., ISO 8859-1 or Unicode) that says that whitespace is "only
 > tabs, spaces and newlines"?

I haven't been able to find any HTML definitions of whitespace, although the
RFC 822 definition works for me... (hmm, maybe I should go check IANA for a
text/html MIME spec... maybe find a clue there?)

 > >With CSS and CSS positioning there's no reason people will resort
 > >to   for creating spaces.
 >
 > They might just because it's HTML and that means they don't have to learn
 > CSS.  Look at all the people still using <FONT FACE> and friends.  I guess
 > some would justify that based on browser support, but there are people who
 > use the BACKGROUND attribute for table cells even though the CSS
 > equivalent is better supported.

Better supported? It's not supported at all in Navigator 3.0, and many people
still use that (because Communicator is a monstrous disk/ram hog).

__________________________________________________________________________
  Walter Ian Kaye <boo_at_best*com>    Programmer - Excel, AppleScript,
          Mountain View, CA                         ProTERM, FoxPro, HTML
 http://www.natural-innovations.com/     Musician - Guitarist, Songwriter

Received on Monday, 14 July 1997 16:18:31 UTC