Re: The <PRE> tag

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl@www3.cern.ch)
Tue, 24 Nov 92 12:10:56 +0100 

Date: Tue, 24 Nov 92 12:10:56 +0100
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-Id: <9211241110.AA03386@www3.cern.ch>
To: Rik Harris <rik@daneel.rdt.monash.edu.au>
Subject: Re: The <PRE> tag
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch


>  Date: Tue, 24 Nov 92 21:54:37 -1000
>  From: Rik Harris <rik@daneel.rdt.monash.edu.au>

>  I think the <PRE> tag is a great idea, too.  The problem with not
>  having newlines significant is that it makes it difficult to do
>  indenting, etc.  One of the reasons the <PRE> tag is nice is that you
>  can take text (eg, manual entries) and not worry about formatting:
>  

>  eg
>  

>  OPTIONS
>  

>    -b   this option performs the blah command.  And if this line is
>         reasonably long, I can demonstrate what I'm talking about.
>  

>    -f   this option performs the foo command.  Another annoying prob-
>         lem is hyphenation.


I was sugesting that you should format the above like

  OPTIONS<p>
<p>
    -b   this option performs the blah command.  And if this line is<p>
         reasonably long, I can demonstrate what I'm talking about.<p>
<p>  

    -f   this option performs the foo command.  Another annoying prob-<p>
         lem is hyphenation.<p>

That is, you explicitly put in the line end, but all white space is significant  
on the line.. It means that lines like

	See also csh, cc, blah, fred and junk.

which would have to be a SINGLE LINE

See also  <a name=csh href=csh.html>csh</a>, <a name=cc href=cc.html>cc</a>, <a  
name=blah2 href=http://sdf.adf.uasdf.edu/fred/doc/junk/blah.html>blah</a>, <a  
name=fred href=fred.html>fred</a> and <a name=junk href=junk.html>csh</a>.

instead could out as for example

See also  

 <a name=csh href=csh.html>csh</a>, 

 <a name=cc href=cc.html>cc</a>, 

 <a name=blah2 href=http://sdf.adf.uasdf.edu/fred/doc/junk/blah.html>blah</a>,
 <a name=fred href=fred.html>fred</a> and <a name=junk href=junk.html>csh</a>.
<p>

which is mailable.  If you look atthe NJIT manual pages HTML, there is a  
mixture of significant line feeds and explicit <p> elements for blank lines:

  OPTIONS
<p>
    -b   this option performs the blah command.  And if this line is
         reasonably long, I can demonstrate what I'm talking about.
<p>  

    -f   this option performs the foo command.  Another annoying prob-
         lem is hyphenation.
<p>

I propose we settle for one or the other.  I wonder whether there is
anything in SGML to suggest which.

	Tim