- From: David Dorward <david@dorward.me.uk>
- Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:06:29 +0000
- To: Ambrose Li <ambrose.li@gmail.com>
- CC: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>, David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>, www-style@w3.org
Ambrose Li wrote:
>> Why not? That's exactly how tab is defined in CSS today. (And how
>> most text
>> editors go about it, as far as I know.)
>>
>
> I doubt it. Otherwise AB<tab>C and A<tab>C will never line up under
> any circumstances;
I can't remember the last time I used a text editor that didn't use a
monospace font (where that system works perfectly). It's an idea system
when dealing with rendering code.
For Emacs, (setq default-tab-width 4) will configure it. In Vim: set
tabstop=4
Word Processors, on the other hand, generally use different systems.
Something along the lines of:
A tab stop is defined as a <length> from the left edge of content.
(This might be different in RTL languages).
A tab character breaks the current inline data, and resumes
rendering at the first tab stop with a length greater then the length
from the left edge of the content to the right edge of the previous
character.
If we wanted to define both methods in CSS we might try something along
the lines of:
tab-size: <integer>
tab-stops: <length> [, <length> ]*
tab-mode: stops | size
We might want to add provision for defining tab stops along the lines of
"Every 15mm".
--
David Dorward
http://dorward.me.uk/
Received on Tuesday, 9 December 2008 10:07:07 UTC