Re: lynx-dev Vlad's suggestions

[Chuck Martin]

On Sun, Mar 07, 1999 at 10:42:38AM +0000, David Woolley wrote:
> 
> <b> & <i> involve a change of font from normal to bold or italic, which
> in general causes a change in character widths, so they are incompatible
> with <pre>

I'd have to disagree with you here.  Even the old IBM Selectric typewriter
with the ball-shaped "element" could do that by popping out the element,
popping in an italics element for a word or phrase, and then reversing
the procedure before continuing.  Bold could be done the same way.  As far
as I can tell, these tags aren't forbidden in the HTML specification.  As
long as the browser authors make sure all fonts used inside a preformatted
block are the same width, there should be no problem.  If they don't do
this, it's the browser's fault if the formatting gets messed up, not the
web page author's.

Another thing that isn't forbidden, but lynx doesn't do properly in
my opinion, is <CENTER> or <DIV>.  Now you may think that centering
text defeats the purpose of <PRE>, but I don't think so.  If you pad
the shorter lines with spaces so that all of the lines are the same
length, you should be able to center a block of text without destroying
the formatting.  This could be desireable if your preformatted block is
composed of many short lines (20 to 30 characters per line, for example).
Netscape will center the block properly (NS actually centers the text
line by line), but lynx turns off the preformatting if it finds such tags.

Chuck