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

On Fri, 6 Sep 2002, Tantek Çelik wrote:
> 
> If you want to style generated content, I strongly recommend you come up
> with a proper solution that does not depend on formatting instruction
> character code hackery.

You can call it "hackery" if you like, but that doesn't stop the fact that
it is useful, used, simple, and implemented.


> "line feed character" is exactly the problem.  It is a character based
> formatting instruction, which is antiquated, and its presence in a CSS
> specification (for that matter, a W3C specification) is very bad
> anachronism.  Like I said, even the Unicode folks have been getting
> rid of all the characters which are simply formatting instructions.

Calling a line feed character "antiquated" or "anachronistic" is
ridiculous. Look around you. Every file on the net has line feeds. This
e-mail has line feeds. There is nothing wrong with line feeds. The Unicode
folk may have been trying to get rid of formatting characters (I am not
privy to their meetings or minutes), but they have been _adding_ line
break characters (U+2028 anyone?).

Yes, we could go one step further and allow for arbitrary styling of
arbitrary new elements in CSS (indeed, David recently suggested we might
want to do just that). But that doesn't make \A any less valuable.

The simple tasks should be easy to do. This is an example of that.

-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
"meow"                                          /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 6 September 2002 03:49:28 UTC