

Re: 'Poetry' Element

From: Chris Lilley <Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr>
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 17:13:55 +0200
Message-Id: <199607031513.RAA06361@www47.inria.fr>
To: preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece)
Scott E. Preece writes:

 > I wouldn't mind the above interpretation being correct, but I'm not sure
 > the two standards taken together read unambiguously on what the result
 > would be.  One could argue that the definition of the PRE element
 > requires the spacing to be uniform, regardless of the font and the
 > correct rendering of your example would use characters from the serif
 > font, but mono-spaced.

Not the way I read it:


PRE element clearly indicates that the default rendering is to be
not the rendering of the resulting HTML element.

 "  Within preformatted text: 

   -   Line breaks within the text are rendered as a move to the
       beginning of the next line. 
   -   Anchor elements and phrase markup may be used. (16) 
   -   Elements that define paragraph formatting (headings, address, 
       etc.) must not be used.
   -   The horizontal tab character (code position 9 in the HTML 
       document character set) must be interpreted as the smallest 
       positive nonzero number of spaces which will leave the number 
       of characters so far on the line as a multiple of 8. Documents 
       should not contain tab characters, as they are not supported
       consistently.  " 

What this doesn't say is that columns which line up in the source
should line up in the rendered version; while this is clearly a
desirable default, over-riding it for specific effects seems ok.

You are wise to call attention to possible disparities between 
HTML 2.0 and CSS, which should be carefully checked; in this instance
however I think there is no conflict.

[1] http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/html2.0/html-spec_5.html#SEC36

Received on Wednesday, 3 July 1996 11:14:47 GMT
