Re: SPaces and Tabs in HTML documents

Chuck Shotton (cshotton@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu)
Mon, 14 Jun 1993 14:27:22 -0600

>I object to collapsing spaces everywhere outside of PRE.
>I agree that coding multiple spaces is not a wise thing
>to do, but I must believe that lacking better solutions,
>we need spaces.

I disagree. White space should be "transparent" because it doesn't mean the
same thing from display to display. What is an 8 character wide tab on a
VT100 turns into some arbitrary chunk of white space on other displays.
What is really needed is some sort of marker like <indent> or <space> with
arguments in some universal unit.

This brings up another white space, namely the question of line ends in
<pre> blocks. What IS the "legal" end of line terminator in HTML? CR/LF? LF
only? Many documents with <pre> sections look great on one client and
horrible on others because of the inconsistent treatment of end of line
characters.
--_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_\_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
Chuck Shotton \
Assistant Director, Academic Computing \ "Are we there yet?"
U. of Texas Health Science Center Houston \
cshotton@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu (713) 794-5650 \
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-\-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-