[Moin-user] Whitespace

[Tim Bird]

Robert Seeger (OR Soft) wrote:
> Hi Shawn,
> regarding your questions:
> 1. we   a l l l   would like to know this, but Thomas does not tell us ;-((

I'm not sure if this is a serious question or not, but here's
an explanation.

In general, HTML (and wiki markup, as a successor to HTML) is
whitespace-insensitive for layout in order to accommodate a wide range of
output devices.  It's hard to tell now, because of the way the standard
evolved, but originally, HTML was to be a semantic markup language only,
with layout and presentation left for the client.  Therefore,
many layout issues, among them the location of word wraps in paragraphs,
are not encoded into the document itself.
Line feeds in HTML are ignored by the browser.

This is handy because the output screen can range in size from a
cell phone to a 16:9 TV (and that's just video displays - print
and other media also have to be accommodated.

The alternative to ignoring line breaks is to have all text that
the client is expected to word-wrap be placed on the same line.
This would be a major pain to edit.

MoinMoin spoils us by interpreting blank lines as paragraph breaks.
Raw HTML does not do this, and even paragraph breaks must be specified
with a <P> tag.

Regards,
 -- Tim

=============================
Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Corporation of America
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