- From: <leslie.brown@evidian.com>
- Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:10:20 +0100
- To: www-style@w3.org
David Woolley wrote: > I suspect, when I check the existing tab definition I will find that > it is a token implementation, rather than something that was > carefully though about, and intended to be extended. I think, > before extending it, one needs to go back and design enhanced tabs > for CSS from first principles. If anyone ever does decide to "design enhanced tabs from first principles" they'll need to be very explicit about defining the behaviour when a tab takes the text past the last available (defined or implicit) tab stop on the line. What should the residual text do? - Go to the start of a new line - Go to the first tab stop on the new line - Fill the space available at the right of the current line (and if there's not enough room?) I'm speaking from pre-web experience. I still have nightmares about cleaning up less-than-expert people's Word documents. They had a habit of using as many tabs as seemed necessary to force a new line without starting a new paragraph. Applying a style with a different typeface and different tab stops gave a result reminiscent of ee cummings without the poetry. And that was before we had thousands of available fonts plus explicit control over word spacing, letter-spacing, rtl/ltr,... My personal feeling is that tabs are intrinsically incompatible with richly formatted text. If you want to line text up in columns, use a table? An exception: preformatted text. It would be VERY practical to be able to adjust the default tab stops (every 8 characters in HTML 4.01) when including, for example, heavily indented source code. Les Brown
Received on Wednesday, 10 December 2008 00:11:04 UTC