- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
 - Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 17:48:35 +0000 (UTC)
 - To: "Jewett, Jim J" <jim.jewett@eds.com>
 - Cc: "'olafBuddenhagen@web.de'" <olafBuddenhagen@web.de>, www-html@w3.org
 
On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Jewett, Jim J wrote:
>> Automatic rebreaking of *any* kind of code doesn't
>> look like a good idea to me -- even with languages
>
> Even with plain text, automatic rebreaking is bad --
> for instance, it can mess up the ">" quote indicators.
> (And if you special case that, what about "Olaf >"?)
If you have *blocks* of text in which the newlines are important, then it
is preformatted text, and the <pre> element is relevant.
> 	(defun foo (x, y)
> 	   (+ x y))
>
> is much better than
>
> 	(defun foo (x, y) (+ x y))
But the latter is better than
       (defun foo (x,
  y) (+x y))
...which is more likely if an inline containing the above wraps.
> This isn't always so easy.  But even in the perfect world -- what is
> your intended difference between "code" and "pre"?
The semantics (code means, well, code, while pre just means preformatted
text block -- people have taken to saying
   <pre><code>
   ...
   </code></pre>
...when marking up block of code).
> A type of poetry defined largely by the metre; changing the
> line breaks would change the per-line syllable counts -- and
> cause it to no longer be Haiku.
This is what the XHTML2 <l> is for, of course. :-)
-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
U+1047E                                         /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Monday, 12 April 2004 13:48:43 UTC