> > I only wish that I could go back in time and show the inventor of <PRE> > > the havoc they have wreaked by making it turn off wrapping by default. > > I'm pretty sure you were joking here but if not...
Actually I was serious. > That's the whole point of PRE, that it *doesn't* wrap. I don't think that is the whole point of PRE. I think the whole point of PRE is that newlines and other whitespace in the HTML source are interpreted literally. It appears that the design committee took it a step too far and decided that newlines in the rendered version of PRE can ONLY appear as a result of newlines in the source. This is counter to the normal behaviour nearly everywhere else in which text wraps when it hits the edge of the medium. > It's for text that's been preformatted, with linefeeds and spacing > already determined. If PRE were to mangle the text by wrapping it at > some margin, it would totally defeat the purpose of the tag. If the "pre-formatted" text is too wide to fit the medium, then *something* has got to give somewhere. There has got to be *some* behaviour. Wrapping is a well-established and convenient way of doing this. Establishing a second (horizontal) scrolling domain is just plain hostile for text documents. > What really needs to be improved is mhonarc or whatever app is used to > make the web archives. It should detect when the message contains no > linebreaks and not use PRE but rather let the browser render it as > normal text, so that it will be wrapped to the width of the screen as > intended. Sounds good to me, and also pretty much the response from my co-worker when I described the problem to him. His response was basically that the system should look at the message it is attempting to render as HTML and if all sequences of non-newlines are 80 characters or less, then use <PRE>, and if not, then use alternative formatting which allows for wrapping, e.g. <TT> with newline processing. Bill -- William Blunn <bill at tao-group dot com> Tao, 62/63 Suttons Business Park, Earley, Reading, RG6 1AZ, UK Tel: +44 845 644 4458, Fax: +44 845 644 4459, Web: http://tao-group.com/ -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/