- From: Bert Bos <bert@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 17:03:04 +0200
- To: www-style@w3.org
On Friday 03 August 2007 14:56, Niklas Åkerlund wrote:
> On 8/3/07, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
> > Niklas Åkerlund wrote:
> > > > From: James Justin Harrell <herorev@yahoo.com
> > > >
> > > > Is there any hope of getting a property to control how far
> > > > apart the tab stops are? The default 8em is much wider than I
> > > > prefer. I would really appreciate a property like "tab-size"
> > > > to control this.
> > > >
> > > > tab-size: 4em;
If you have a file with tabs that are not 8 characters apart, you can
use "expand" (under Unix) to convert the tabs to spaces before you add
the HTML mark-up.
> > >
> > > I managed to dig this up in the archive, because to me this
> > > really is an issue. And nothing seems to have come out of it.
> > > yet.... ...
All W3C technologies are a compromise between rich semantics (i.e., easy
to read for computers) and ease of use (i.e., easy to write for
humans). Tabulation is a remnant from the days of typewriters that may
sometimes be slightly easier than real tables, but it really has no
place in a semantic Web.
The TAB character in ASCII is a control code, like formfeed (FF),
carriage return (CR), line feed (LF) or escape (ESC). They used to
control the movement of printers. CR and LF still make sense as line
separators (in <pre>), because it's more convenient to type a LF than
tags such as <l>...</l>. But FF, TAB and ESC (and BEL, BS, etc.) are
not needed for HTML and similar documents.
It is true that we are missing a type of tabular layout in CSS level 2
that allows overflow into the next column, e.g., like this:
Short item . . . . . . . . . . 12345.67
Another short item . . . . . . . 12.34
An item with a description that is too
wide for one column . . . . 1234.56
There are ideas for how to do this completely generally, but by far the
most common case is that there is a left-aligned part and a
right-aligned part with something flexible in between (typically dots
or space). We may stop at that common case, where there are exactly
two "tab stops" (in typewriter terminology), viz., the left and right
edges. See http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-css3-gcpm-20070504/#leaders
However, to get this layout, you will have to mark-up the parts. A TAB
character doesn't replace a tag: <p>Short item <span
class=value>12345.67</span></p>, etc.
Bert
--
Bert Bos ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
http://www.w3.org/people/bos W3C/ERCIM
bert@w3.org 2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 92 38 76 92 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Wednesday, 8 August 2007 15:03:14 UTC