Re: lynx-dev <BR> does not accumulate

[Dave Eaton]

On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, Philip Webb wrote:

> ...[clip]...
> even collapsing spaces & tabs is not simple:
> no doubt, multiple spaces become  1 space  & multiple tabs become  1 tab ,
> but what does  1 space + 1 tab  collapse to:  1 space  or  1 tab ?

I suggest you take another look at section 9.1 of
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/text.html

A tab is whitespace and whitespace is collapsed to a single inter-word.
Further down it discusses inter-word and that relatonship to character
sets and particularly that in Latin sets it is typically a space and what
happens for Japanese, etc.

> ...[clip]...
> i'ld say it's patent that the authors of HTML 4.0 didn't think it thro',

I think you are not giving the authors enough credit and are misreading
what's there. Don't forget that HTML is an SGML DTD. The key is document
*structure* _not_ page layout. Within that context, it is easy to accept
that it isn't intended that you as a Web page author define a number of
lines of verticle spacing, indentation, etc. with HTML tags.  When you try
to do so, you are getting off the rails.  Such rendering is up to the
agent (the lynx browser in our case). Thus the ultimate user of a flexible
agent could specify how much space to see between entities (paras, etc.)
and what fonts were to be used for headings, text, etc. so they could best
read it. 

Also, what this can mean (if the agent elected to implement such a
feature) is that the user could specify the structural components they
wanted to see and the rest of the document could be collapsed out ... e.g. 
an "outline" mode with no work on the author's part that shows just the
level of detail the reader wants to have. (No, I don't have the time to
implement such code for lynx, though I wish I did.) 

Regards,
 Dave Eaton
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