Re: CSS and Eccentric Poems.

 From: Carl Johan Berglund <f92-cbe@nada.kth.se>
 
| Bert Bos wrote:
| > This spacing is indeed too irregular for CSS1. Some sort of mark-up
| > has to be in the HTML; a <SPAN> seems logical, but a <BR> would work
| > as well, and is shorter to type:-)...

| >     spring<br class=gap1>when the world is mud-<br>
| >     luscious the little<br>
| >     lame baloonman
| 
| The problem here is that <br> is not a container--there is
| no </br> tag, so there is no content of the <br> that can
| be styled in any way. But setting the space between paragraphs
| to zero (as proposed) means you can do it with <p>.
---

The standard appears to be ambiguous here.  The box formatting model is only
defined to apply to block-level elements and the WIDTH property is in
the "box properties" section of the standard, but it says explicitly
that it can be applied to "text elements," which doesn't seem to be
defined in either in CSS or in HTML 2.0.  So I don't think you could
count on being able to use DISPLAY=INLINE and WIDTH on BR (since setting
DISPLAY to other than BLOCK may disable box properties).

I'm not sure whether P will work or not - at one point I understood the
formatting model to not support run-in text, implying that P had to
force a new line (at least if it's doing DISPLAY=BLOCK, which it has to
in order to assume WIDTH will work, as above).

The worse problem is that the standard allows the DISPLAY attribute to
be hardcoded by the browser, so either P or BR could fail to
work as expected. So it may not be possible to do reliable intra-line
spacing using the properties in CSS1 after all.

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
phone:	217-384-8589			  fax:	217-384-8550
internet mail:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com

Received on Wednesday, 3 July 1996 10:27:26 UTC