White space, new lines in tags

[Harlan Messinger]

What rules deal with attribute values with trailing spaces, or tags or
attribute values with embedded newlines? Examples below: the HREF with
embedded newline, the SRC with trailing spaces, and IMG tag spread over
multiple lines.

<a href="myself.html
">
<img src="/images/picture.gif " width="80"
height="65"
alt="What, me worry?"></a>

[Benjamin Niemann]

Harlan Messinger wrote:

What rules deal with attribute values with trailing spaces, or tags or
attribute values with embedded newlines? Examples below: the HREF with
embedded newline, the SRC with trailing spaces, and IMG tag spread over
multiple lines.

<a href="myself.html
">
<img src="/images/picture.gif " width="80"
height="65"
alt="What, me worry?"></a>

White space (including linebreaks) between attributes is not significant,
use it as much as you like - I use this often to keep lines short.

Regarding white space in attribute values: the HTML Spec says
User agents may ignore leading and trailing white space in CDATA
attribute values.
<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#h-6.2>
I have not tested this in detail, but I think that most browsers do strip
the white space - I have seen various sites with such links and it seems to
work. But you should not rely on it, some UAs may not do it and encounter a
broken link.

--
Benjamin Niemann
Email: pink at odahoda dot de
WWW: http://pink.odahoda.de/

[Csaba Gabor]

Harlan Messinger wrote:

What rules deal with attribute values with trailing spaces, or tags or
attribute values with embedded newlines? Examples below: the HREF with
embedded newline, the SRC with trailing spaces, and IMG tag spread over
multiple lines.

<a href="myself.html
">
<img src="/images/picture.gif " width="80"
height="65"
alt="What, me worry?"></a>

<span id=foo onclick="alert('Don\'t \
forget&nbsp;to include &#x5C;
this')">Click me</span>

Csaba Gabor from Vienna

[VK]

Harlan Messinger wrote:

What rules deal with attribute values with trailing spaces, or tags or
attribute values with embedded newlines? Examples below: the HREF with
embedded newline, the SRC with trailing spaces, and IMG tag spread over
multiple lines.

<a href="myself.html
">
<img src="/images/picture.gif " width="80"
height="65"
alt="What, me worry?"></a>

Space characters (space, tab, form feed, new line) are not significant
and being collapsed to a single space by parser (unless in <pre>
block).

This is HTML rule equal for all UA's (including Amaya).

You may want to watch instead line breaks and spaces *between* tag
because on some surrent implementations it leads to phantom nodes in
DOM Tree.

[Andy Dingley]

Harlan Messinger wrote:

What rules deal with attribute values with trailing spaces, or tags or
attribute values with embedded newlines?

Supposedly not much is significant.

In practice whitespace around the outside of tags sometimes shows up
when you don't want it (particularly <a> in IE).

Also IE5/Mac infamously dislikes extra whitespace inside class
attributes, such as around class names, or doubled spaces between
multiple class names.

[Henri Sivonen]

In article <11**********************@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups .com>,
"VK" <sc**********@yahoo.com> wrote:

Space characters (space, tab, form feed, new line) are not significant
and being collapsed to a single space by parser (unless in <pre>
block).

Not true in the real world. Even in cases where they are collapsed in
*layout* they aren't collapsed in the *parser*.

--
Henri Sivonen
hs******@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html

[VK]

Henri Sivonen wrote:

In article <11**********************@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups .com>,
"VK" <sc**********@yahoo.com> wrote:

Space characters (space, tab, form feed, new line) are not significant
and being collapsed to a single space by parser (unless in <pre>
block).

Not true in the real world. Even in cases where they are collapsed in
*layout* they aren't collapsed in the *parser*.

I did really not understand the last opposition. There is not *layout*
issue here, because it is not a layout: these are *indentations* used
in the source code (aka pretty-prints or beautifying) They have not -
and should not have - any effect on layout of anything. Or you mean to
say that after the source code is served to the client, some block on
the client side remembers that say:

<link rel="stylesheet"

type="text/css"

href="foobar.css">

was served with new_line - new_line - space between attributes? Which
one then and for what purpose?

[Henri Sivonen]

In article <11**********************@i39g2000cwa.googlegroups .com>,
"VK" <sc**********@yahoo.com> wrote:

Henri Sivonen wrote:

In article <11**********************@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups .com>,
"VK" <sc**********@yahoo.com> wrote:

Space characters (space, tab, form feed, new line) are not significant
and being collapsed to a single space by parser (unless in <pre>
block).

Not true in the real world. Even in cases where they are collapsed in
*layout* they aren't collapsed in the *parser*.

I did really not understand the last opposition.

White space between attributes is not preserved in the DOM. White space
in text content is preserved in general--not only inside <pre>. However,
by *default*, white space is collapsed in layout except for <pre>.

--
Henri Sivonen
hs******@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html

[jschleiden]

How about something like this:

<div id="content" class="example TemplateExample">whatever</div>

How is that handled? Also what is the benefit?
-j

[Jack]

js********@gmail.com wrote:

How about something like this:

<div id="content" class="example TemplateExample">whatever</div>

How is that handled? Also what is the benefit?

That declares a <div> element that belongs to two distinct classes. The
benefit might be some elegance/efficiency in the associated CSS.

--
Jack.

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Jack wrote:

js********@gmail.com wrote:

How about something like this:

<div id="content" class="example TemplateExample">whatever</div>

How is that handled? Also what is the benefit?

That declares a <div> element that belongs to two distinct classes.
The benefit might be some elegance/efficiency in the associated CSS.

It might also hide the associated styling from some lesser
browser/versions which don't understand the multiple-class construct.
Whether one considers that a disadvantage or a benefit depends on
one's attitude to web design. (no smiley)

regards

[Tony]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Jack wrote:

js********@gmail.com wrote:

How about something like this:

<div id="content" class="example TemplateExample">whatever</div>

How is that handled? Also what is the benefit?

That declares a <div> element that belongs to two distinct classes.
The benefit might be some elegance/efficiency in the associated CSS.

It might also hide the associated styling from some lesser
browser/versions which don't understand the multiple-class construct.

Browsers/versions such as...? I haven't encountered that particular
limitation yet, so I'd like to know where it pops up.

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Tony wrote:

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

It might also hide the associated styling from some lesser
browser/versions which don't understand the multiple-class
construct.

Browsers/versions such as...? I haven't encountered that particular
limitation yet, so I'd like to know where it pops up.

I don't have details at my fingertips, but google search for terms e.g

multiple.classes css bugs

suggests, among other things,

http://www.richinstyle.com/bugs/table.html

http://www.pixelsurge.com/experiment/multiplestyles.htm

- which don't necessarily agree with each other; but it seems the
affected browsers are old enough by now that their users may be
presumed to encounter quite enough problems with other people's web
pages that a few missing CSS styles on ours would be of no great
consequence to them. After all, CSS is meant to be optional, by
design.

As ever, YMMV ...

regards

[Andy Dingley]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

It might also hide the associated styling from some lesser
browser/versions which don't understand the multiple-class construct.

IMHE there aren't any browsers that suffer from this.

Counter-examples welcome. I'm sure there are some, but they're not
examples that are going to worry me or make me stop using the multiple
class technique.