In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Bob Page <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> Ben Bucksch wrote:
>
> > the (default) composer is a HTML composer.
>
> So the HTML composer is compressing the whitespace. It doesn't need to
> for internal storage of course, but it needs to for user feedback -
> the user gets a WYSIWYG experience. Makes sense.
The html composer modifies runs of spaces it encounters in portions of a
document that you modify. It does this to try to preserve the semantics
of whitespace that the user puts in the document. It also does it
totally wrong. It is hard to do it right. That's what is being fixed,
by me, now (ongoing).
> But that *shouldn't* matter since we shouldn't be using an HTML composer
> for constructing text/plain documents: the formatting rules are different.
Now I don't know what yo uare talking about. Plaintext docuemtns do
not, in fact, have the whitespace issues that I am working on. The
stuff I am fixing is stuff revealed by Robin's excellent test cases.
Those are not plaintext documents.
> I get it now, thanks. Sounds like a hard problem - getting an HTML
> composer to 'think' like text/plain.
It's a little hard in mail, because mail doesn't really do plaintext.
In replies, for instance, the reply text is inside a <pre> in order to
preserve wrapping of the original text. <pre> elements are obviously
not something you expect to find in a plaintext document.
However, those documents do have a whitespace: pre style on the body,
which means that whitespace should all be significant. Thus the editor
doesn't have very much to worry about there. Are you telling me there
are problems with spaces suddenly appearing/disappearing when editing
plaintext documents?
--
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@netscape @netscape
