Re: Friendly Specs

Susan Lesch wrote:
> Well, if you have a suggestion for wide PRE sections (which seem to
> be more and more common for XML) please do tell. The above is the
> best I could find.

In most cases scrolling due to PRE can be avoided given a little effort.
I avoid PRE whenever possible for this reason, instead using a P element
with a class of 'example' (or whatever) (and P.example {font-family:
monospace}), and <BR>s. In 99.5% of cases it is not important that the
PREformatted element be displayed on one line, and so use of PRE is
usually laziness. Unfortunately there isn't any tool that will
automatically convert PRE (which of course should have been deprecated
years ago in favour of BLOCKCODE, BLOCKSAMP and P with style sheets for
other uses (since PRE is totally devoid of any meaning)) to P, so it is
a somewhat laborious task, but one that pays rich dividends for those
who use the documents.
 
> >I have noted that the quality of markup syntax has improved from what it
> >used to be.

Although still a little more effort would make the specs readable in all
browsers (for example, quite a few documents suffer from Netscape 4
losing margins due to the number of tables on their pages (a case in
point are the tables used in the CSS specification to line up the
'initial value', syntax and similar sections - if one is going to use
old-style hackish markup, such as tables for alignment, then one should
ensure that it works correctly)); a quick run through with (the W3C's
own!) HTML Tidy would rectify this (by adding the end tags)).