Re: Tabs in CSS1

   From: Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>
| 
| There has been discussion about this for future enhancements
| to CSS. One approach is define tab rule property with the ability
| to set tab stops at particular positions, differentiating between
| left, center, right and "decimal" tabs. A horizontal tab character
| then moves the output position to the next tab stop. Instead of
| the '\t' char you could require an SGML entity or an element,
| e.g. <tab align=right>.
| 
| One issue is whether there should be a default tab rule with
| tab stops at regular intervals, and whether when you move past
| the last tab stop on an explicit rule, you then see the default
| tab stops. Another issue is what to do when the output position
| is already to the right of the next tab stop: should the tab be
| treated as if it werer a single space character, or should you
| skip to the next defined tab stop (which may well be of a different
| type e.g. a decimal tab stop rather than a left tab stop).
---

Another approach (which, like the ones you list, would be "the right
thing" in some cases) is to skip to the corresponding tab position in
the following line.

There's a difficult dynamic here - you really want to have tab
capability both on the HTML side (because a lot of use of tabs is really
marking relationships between elements) and on the stylesheet side
(because you'd like to be able to use tabs in controlling positioning of
elements for presentation).  I'd hate to have two different notations,
but I don't see, off-hand, how to handle this problem cleanly in both
domains at once.

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 Thursday, 21 November 1996 12:57:05 UTC