Formatting code/scripts/configuration files rendered on a website

Scripsit Stanimir Stamenkov:

If the only reason not use <pre> is it "has no semantic meaning" you
could give it meaning, like:

pre><code>...</code></pre

That does not give any meaning to <pre>. Using semantic markup inside
non-semantic markup does not make the outer markup any more markup. Au
contraire, it empasizes its semantic emptyness.

Yet, <pre> is the only way in HTML to specify that whitespace is
significant, so if your data has "a b" that shall be intepreted as
different from "a b" in meaning, then <pre> is the correct markup.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Scripsit Hendrik Maryns:

By HTML specifications, tab stops should appear in a certain way
_and_ authors should not rely on this. Use the safe way: spaces.

Can you explain this further?

Quoting the HTML 4.01 spec (which echoes HTML 2, though with some
obscurity):

"The horizontal tab character [...] is usually interpreted by visual
user agents as the smallest non-zero number of spaces necessary to line
characters up along tab stops that are every 8 characters. We strongly
discourage using horizontal tabs in preformatted text since it is common
practice, when editing, to set the tab-spacing to other values, leading
to misaligned documents."

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#h-9.3.4

Well, it doesn't explain much. But tab stop settings may depend on the
environment, so the tab character does not work reliably.

I do not want to use spaces there since
that’s not what I use in the original file as well.

Yet, it's the effect that matters, and spaces are the safe way to
achieve that.

I've used the M-x untabify function in Emacs, the text editor, when I
have needed to convert text with tabs to text without them.

I could wrap the whole thing in a table, right, but that would make it
more work than it’s worth.

I agree that it's not very practical, and neither is the idea of using
<div> markup with classes and styling - though this would be the way to
achieve indentation that is easily modified just by changing one CSS
rule.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:00:52 +0300, /Jukka K. Korpela/:

Scripsit Stanimir Stamenkov:

If the only reason not use <pre> is it "has no semantic meaning" you
could give it meaning, like:

pre><code>...</code></pre

That does not give any meaning to <pre>. Using semantic markup inside
non-semantic markup does not make the outer markup any more markup. Au
contraire, it empasizes its semantic emptyness.

Yet, <pre> is the only way in HTML to specify that whitespace is
significant, so if your data has "a b" that shall be intepreted as
different from "a b" in meaning, then <pre> is the correct markup.

So combining "the <pre> meaning is a block where whitespace matters"
further marking the content as <code> seems good way to go, or I'm
missing something?

--
Stanimir

Scripsit Stanimir Stamenkov:

So combining "the <pre> meaning is a block where whitespace matters"
further marking the content as <code> seems good way to go, or I'm
missing something?

I think that's the best way for computer code where whitespace matters.

Using <code> is not pragmatically very important, since <pre> markup
already sets the font to monospace, but <code> carries semantic
information, could be used for styling, and it is observed by some
automatic translation software (so that they treat <code> contents as
literal, to be preserved as such).

For example, if you have both blocks of code and some fragments of code
in paragraphs, using <code> for all code is a good idea, for uniform
styling. (Or for non-uniform in a controlled manner, via classes, since
you might wish to make a visual distinction e.g. between source program
code and operating system commands.)

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

On 2008-06-19, Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:00:52 +0300, /Jukka K. Korpela/:
Scripsit Stanimir Stamenkov:

If the only reason not use <pre> is it "has no semantic meaning" you
could give it meaning, like:

pre><code>...</code></pre

That does not give any meaning to <pre>. Using semantic markup inside
non-semantic markup does not make the outer markup any more markup. Au
contraire, it empasizes its semantic emptyness.

Yet, <pre> is the only way in HTML to specify that whitespace is
significant, so if your data has "a b" that shall be intepreted as
different from "a b" in meaning, then <pre> is the correct markup.

So combining "the <pre> meaning is a block where whitespace matters"
further marking the content as <code> seems good way to go, or I'm
missing something?

Rather than two nested elements, I'd use a class:

<pre class="code">

--
Chris F.A. Johnson <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
================================================== =================
Author:
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)