Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–12 of 12 posts

Re: When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)

#11

Post by [deleted] »

8xde0wcNwpslOw wrote: post #8
z3t4 wrote: post #3

I just hate when the web browsers renders differently depending on if you have a line break between certain elements. Line breaks in HTML source code should not matter!

>Line breaks in HTML source code should not matter! So, should you put spaces at the end, or at the beginning of lines in text that's broken into multiple lines?

[deleted]

Re: When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)

#12

Post by paulddraper »

CM30 wrote: post #9

Who actually thought rendering the white space between inline-block elements was a good idea in the first place? Seriously, I genuinely cannot see a use case where this setup would make things better, and it's quite clear that in 95% of them it just makes things harder for web developers. Pretty much no one uses this to align anything, and any use cases I can see could be done better with margins. Just ignore the spa…

Putting yourself in the driver's seat decades ago, how should these render? What content should the browser put on the clipboard? How should text selection work?

    See Spot run.
    See Spot run.
Given that HTML is a text markup language, it made sense for text (including whitespace) to be significant, and the SGML to be minimally disruptive. 10% tags 90% text.

Now, in 2018 we want to develop applications not documents, and our HTML is now 90% tags 10% text.

In retrospect, inline should do what inline-block does now. And flexbox should have been used instead of many table/inline-block/float hacks. CSS is a mess: 20/100 foresight and 20/20 hindsight.

Post reply on HN