When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)
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Re: When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)
#2As of 2018 there is no neat helpful way of resolving white space problems that I know of in Chrome devtools. I wish there was as I can remember trying to get the white space removed from a search box and the search submit button, almost getting into the realms of hacky negative margin things before the penny dropped that it was the white space problem that I had known since the IE6 days.
If using code to generate HTML then you can remove white space with Google's mod_pagespeed. This will only remove a certain amount and what remains either 'doesn't matter' or is something that needs fixing in templates.
I doubt there is a performance penalty for excessive white space but it is satisfying to be able to 'view source' for the document to be pretty printed with the exception of indentation. In my opinion source documents should be neat, otherwise might aw well just give up on HTML and go for some byte code HEX digit stream in a non-human-readable format.
Re: When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)
#3I 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!
Re: When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)
#4Funnny how I hesitated clicking the link because part of my brain insisted that whitespace in HTML was "boring". Not worth of consideration. I'm glad I did click in the end becaus this article summarily answered a host of questions I'd collected over the years. I have a much clearer model now.
Re: When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)
#5I 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!
But what if you want to use elements like
or ? How would you put in a line break on the rendered page? I suppose there's an argument to be made for not rendering line breaks as a space, but such a change to the HTML spec at this stage is probably not going to happen.
Re: When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)
#6Also fun: whitespace after
Re: When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)
#7It doesn't matter, but couldn't help but notice that the honorable form feed (U+000C) was missing from the definition given. https://infra.spec.whatwg.org/#ascii-whitespace is the concept used in the HTML parser. (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html)
Re: When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)
#8I 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?
Re: When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)
#9Who 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 spaces between inline-block elements and instruct browsers to strip them out.
Re: When does white space matter in HTML? (2016)
#10Who 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…
They’re elements that appear as inline to their surroundings, and blocks to their contents. In what way wouldn’t you want it to render white space in the same way as other inline elements?
If you’re misusing inline-block for generic layout then you really should be looking at Flexbox and not trying to neuter the intended behaviour.