Re: [Lynx-dev] Feature request: handle style=white-space: pre

[David Woolley]

Chuck Houpt wrote:

> Thanks for the example, the restrictions on PRE are annoying.

I think they have a deep historical background.  Basically PRE pre-dates 
IMG which pre-dates image replacement (of text).

In the original HTML concept, images would either be first class 
resources, accessed through A elements, or part of documents in non-HTML 
formats (HTML was for rich navigation and cataloguing).  Mosaic added 
IMG as a special link that embeds the image in graphical browsers, but 
they probably didn't consider allowing it in PRE because image sizes 
cannot be relied on to correlate with text sizes and they hadn't thought 
of image replacement.

I think there is still a problem with using IMG in PRE, as you cannot 
rely on the exact text size, so the pre-formatting can be broken by an 
image.  (More generally, with image replacement, the user has the right 
to override your text size and image replacement doesn't handle that 
well.  I regularly do this on graphical browsers, because designers 
think unreadably small text is cool.)


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David Woolley
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