Re: CSS2.1: \A and white-space

FWIW, this whole "inserting into the output" as far as text is concerned in
my opinion is an unnecessary complexity (and ill-conceived and broken for
that matter as David explains with his examples).

For that matter, the whole '\A' nonsense really had no need to exist in the
first place, because instead of hacking :before (or :after) and the content
property, and introducing yet another processing notion (input vs. output
text), there could have merely been introduced a new property (or two)
called line-break-before (line-break-after) taking values 'auto' and
'always' in order to emulate (and remove any need for) the <br> element.
E.g.

br { line-break-after:always }

This isn't a new idea by any means. What I stated here is a reduced version
of:

 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/1999Mar/0070.html

(FWIW I think we could do without the 'avoid' value and the
'line-break-inside' property for now).


On 9/5/02 8:15 AM, "L. David Baron" <dbaron@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

> 
> On Monday 2002-08-26 18:56 +0200, Bert Bos wrote:
>> No, the 'white-space' property has no effect on '\A', since the '\A'
>> is not inserted into the *input* of the CSS renderer, but into the
>> *output*. Whitespace in the input is a form of mark-up and is thus
> 
> By that logic, how do you explain that the 'text-transform' property
> does apply?  Or, for that matter, 'text-decoration'?  Or 'color'?
> 
>> interpreted by the HTML (or XML) parser and further undergoes
>> transformations by the CSS renderer. But the '\A' is simply part of
>> the rendered output. You can regard it as a glyph or as a control
>> code, but the term "whitespace" doesn't apply to it.
>> 
>> It is the same situation as when you do this:
>> 
>>   p:before {content: "<em>"}
>> 
>> That simply inserts four literal characters into the ouput, it does
>> not create an EM element.

It should do neither.  It should insert "&lt;em&gt;" into the input.

> Given the CSS

<snip/>

Great example David.

> I'm not sure how seriously to take this idea of "inserting into the
> output".

I agree.

Tantek

Received on Thursday, 5 September 2002 18:44:04 UTC