Re: Monospaced font

Bert Bos (Bert.Bos@sophia.inria.fr)
Sun, 3 Dec 1995 22:21:37 +0100

Glenn Adams writes:
>
> From: Stephen Turner <S.R.E.Turner@statslab.cam.ac.uk>
> Date: Fri, 1 Dec 1995 18:10:18 +0000 (GMT)
>
> In font-family: monospace, are two consecutive spaces in the source
> represented by twice as much space in the output (like HTML <pre> but
> unlike Netscape <code>)? Should it be defined, or is this too specific
> for this spec?
>
> You bring up a good point. CSS1 needs a "verbatim" property indicates that
> whitespace should not be folded. This was one of the first things I added
> in our UA's support of CSS.

`Monospace' is just a generic font family, many formatters will
probably interpret it as `Courier'. It doesn't say anything about
collapsing whitespace and line breaks.

As Glenn says, there should be a `verbatim' property in CSS1. There
will be; the only reason that it isn't there yet is that it would be
the first boolean property in CSS. But if we can't think of a useful
generalization soon it will be `preformatted: yes/no'. (It's not
`verbatim' because (1) `preformatted' is the term HTML writers already
know, and (2) `verbatim' might give the impression that markup is left
uninterpreted, which is impossible.)

Bert

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  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
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