On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 22:19, Glyph
Looking at the actual output now, these characters strike me as an accident of how browsers collapse different types of whitespace. They could be replaced with a <span style="width: 4em;" /> to avoid this problem for now, which is probably more expressive.
The "width" property does not apply to non-replaced inline elements (i.e. "display: inline", like span) [1], "padding-left: 4em" produces the same result though. Apart from the fact that "padding-left: 4em" (or "width: 4em") will not be preserved if you attempt to copy the text, and width: 4em are not actually the same thing and do not produce the same result, even with a monospace font. I've attached a small document demonstrating this. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visudet.html#the-width-property -- Jonathan