Subject: Re: HTML problem
From: sam th (sam@bur-jud-118-039.rh.uchicago.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 11 2000 - 23:14:11 CST
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On Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Paul Rohr wrote:
> At 09:36 PM 2/11/00 -0600, sam th wrote:
> >I have a suggestion. Take the document you sent me, and view it as html in
> >sy, lynx. (most web browsers will ignore all the other tags. Then view
> >it in abiword. the html will look double-spaced. This is NOT how it
> >looks in abiword. Then edit the file by hand, and remove the <p> tags,
> >and add <br /> tags in place of the </p> tags. Then view it again as
> >html. You will see that it looks like the abiword display. If we wanted
> >consitency of markup, we would use <p></p> the way we did before.
> >However, what we want (AFAIK) is consitency of appearance across all
> >exported formats. Thus, <br /> tags do the job, and <p> tags don't.
>
> I'm not going to debate this one. Paragraphs have P tags, forced line
> breaks get BR tags. Period.
I accept that this is desirable. However, the principle of Least Surprise
indicates that we must have export that looks like the input.
>
> You're getting confused by the fact that different "user agents" (to use
> CSS-speak) have different default styles bound to certain basic tags. Thus,
> the vanilla whitespace between paragraphs may differ if nobody specifies
> style properties explicitly.
>
> For example, the "implicit" style for P tags in most HTML browsers adds
> whitespace, while the hardwired stylesheet in AbiWord currently doesn't. As
> soon as we add template support, that may no longer be true. (For example,
> I always override that aspect of the default style in my own documents.
> It looks stupid.)
I find this idea very interesting. First, as far as I can tell, Mozilla
is the only web browser that lets you edit the default style sheets it
uses for html. Additionally, when I have tried to use the whitespace
attribute, it has had no effect at all, much less the effect we are
looking for. Furthermore, by my reading of the CSS2 spec, none of the
three whitespace styles seem to do what we want them to do.
> If you want the output to look more consistent, then figure out how to
> export the style information which is controlling inter-block whitespace.
>
> Paul
>
As stated above, there doesn't seem to be such a style. If you know of
one, I'm happy to make the changes.
sam th
sytobinh@uchicago.edu
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