[whatwg] Pre element question

[Ian Hickson]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2007, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
>
> On Saturday 20 January 2007 01:08, Ian Hickson wrote:
> >
> > In HTML5, we're dropping that requirement, since everyone ignores it.
> > However, we will, as you point out, have to introduce a special behaviour
> > for a newline at the start of a <pre> element. IE actually does it for
> > more than just the <pre> element (e.g. it does it for <p>, though not
> > <span>) but compatibility with the Web only seems to require it for <pre>
> > since that's all that the other browsers do it for.
>
> Would it be inconceivable to let <pre> parse like any other elements, 
> and then somehow drop any initial newline during the rendering?

That would involve CSS changes, and would require every mainstream HTML UA 
to simultaneously change their parsing _and_ their rendering, which is a 
lot harder than just making the spec match existing practice.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'