Subject: Re: Wrapping long lines (Was Re: FAQ update suggestion for "I'm having basic problems with find. Why?")
From: Brian Dessent <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2004 04:48:41 -0700

William Blunn wrote:

> > 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.

Sometimes you want to express that something is all on one line. 
Perhaps it's a command, or the ouput of a command.  I'm sure there's
other instances that come up every now and then.  If PRE were to wrap at
the screen margin there'd be no way to do this.  The way I see it the
PRE tag is for saying to the browser, "Hands off.  This text has already
been formatted how I want it and is to appear exactly as follows, and if
that means the screen must scroll if it's too narrow then so be it."  If
it is used inappropriately (such as in the case of the list archives)
and it causes awkward scrolling, then that's really the fault of the
page design or the program that generated it, not of the tag.  If you
want the browser to wrap the text then it's not really preformatted
anymore.

Brian

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