Re: Simple (?) HTML problem

["Simon Coulter" <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Jon,

You wrote:
>The code below shows basically what I'm trying to do.  It is a simple table
>to contain pre-formed print lines.  The tags that are causing the problem
>are the <PRE> ones.  They work just fine in terms of maintaining the
>spacing within a line, but they cause the row height to be doubled for no
>reason I can see.  It seems to me that I should be able to use <CODE>
>instead.  True enough this resolves the height issue, but also causes the
>line spacing to get scewed up because multiple spaces are compressed.  This
>seems very strange behaviour for a tag designed to allow you to show code
>samples but .....

The "problem" is that the </pre> tag inserts a hard carriage return.  The 
row height is not really doubled, it just appears that way because you are 
providing a single line of text.  </Pre> adds a carriage return thus causing 
two lines to appear in the row.  You can prove this by formatting multiple 
lines within one <pre> block.  For example:

     <TR bgcolor="#C6EFF7"><TD><pre>12345678901234567890
another line
yet another line
more lines
</pre></TD></TR>

will format correctly as single spaced lines followed by an empty line.  You 
can also see this effect by inserting an extraneous </pre> tag in the middle 
of a paragraph.  For example:

<P>Here is some formatted text followed by an extra tag:
</pre>
And here is the continuation with no paragraph tag.

will format with a blank line where the </pre> tag occurs due to the hard 
carriage return.  Remove the </pre> and the lines format as single spaced 
again.

I think you'll just have to live with it.  The formatting may also vary 
depending on which browser you suffer.

The reason <code> doesn't seem to do what you want is because it is a 
logical formatting tag rather than a physical formatting tag.  That 
distinction is probably the biggest failing in HTML.  HTML is a bit confused 
as to whether it is a markup language or a formatting language.  They should 
never have designed physical tags but simply made everything logical but 
that leads into another argument entirely ....

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

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