On 6/23/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech(a)gmail.com> wrote:
So what to do with leading spaces? Well, one common
and important use
for leading spaces is to make some kind of chart or diagram, to indent
elements so they fit together properly. HTML provides the <pre> tag
for that: it overrides the default space-compressing behavior and
PREserves all spaces, line breaks, etc. exactly as entered. So, if
you knew HTML, you could make such a chart with <pre>, but what if you
didn't? Well, with this markup, just try entering it and presto, it
will work, because your leading spaces clue the parser into the fact
that you want it to display with spacing preserved.
Thanks for this explanation. I don't quite follow the logical step
that was made between "one common and important use" and "the way this
should work", but, hey. In practice, in Wikipedia, this "common and
important" use is basically never used - we certainly don't want ASCII
art in our articles. A much more "common" use would actually be to
allow quoting of other material. Grey box, border and indent: yes.
Monospace and no word-wrap: no. As I say, on the rare instances that
someone actually wants ascii art, they could always use <PRE>
manually.
But yeah, that's just the way things work out. I seem to recall we had
a discussion about a syntax element to make quoting easier recently,
but nothing much came out of it.
Steve