RE: 1.2 Text Wrapping ...section 1.5

>>>>> "RD" == Robert Diblasi <rdiblas@wpo.it.luc.edu> writes:

RD> QUESTION: Should SVG have "preformatted" attribute?  

RD> Could someone give the advantages vs. disadvanages?

    Well, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me the
preformatted stuff in HTML is viewed as problematic (so I encourage
people that see the problems clearer than I to speak up).

    I can see some of the issues - like preformatting turns off text
wrapping so a preformatted line will just get clipped if the area it
is placed in isn't wide enough (this can be problematic for people
that need to enlarge the font size to read text - of course in SVG you
can just zoom).

    The big advantage is that in certain circles you commonly have
rigidly formatted text (like say XML or source code) and preserving
that rigid formatting (in particular leading indents) can be extreamly
difficult if you have to do it with the margin properties (I'm
thinking particularly of transcoding operations here - count leading
spaces have some notion of the size of a space - which will be wrong
if the user changes the font size!).  What you really want to say is
preserve the formatting of this text, don't wrap it, don't collapse
white space, just keep it as is.

Received on Wednesday, 4 December 2002 09:21:46 UTC