Re: CSS equivalent of IE's wrap="off" and wrap="hard"

Gérard Talbot wrote:

What would be the best CSS equivalent of MSIE's wrap="off" and wrap="hard"?

Have you checked the recent "textarea wrap" thread? It's a bit confused,
but it becomes relatively clear if you ignore everything that "VK" wrote.

Gérard Talbot wrote:

I stopped at the point where there is too much fighting.

There was no fighting; it takes two to fighting. In the other thread,
there was information and disinformation, and someone kept repeating the
disinformation (and apparently got nervous when repeatedly corrected).

My question is
a technical one; it shouldn't lead to fighting.

Welcome to Usenet. :-)

MSDN "hard Text is displayed with wordwrapping and submitted with
soft returns and line feeds."

That's Microsoftese for saying that the browser, in addition to
displaying (echoing) data in a certain way, distorts the data by
inserting line breaks (Carriage Return and Line Feed). The word "soft"
is particularly misleading here.

CSS 2.1 on white-space: pre-line says:
"This value directs user agents to collapse sequences of whitespace.
Lines are broken at newlines in the source, at occurrences of "\A" in
generated content, and as necessary to fill line boxes."

CSS 2.1 is a draft that says that it is inappropriate to cite it as
other than work as progress, though the W3C itself in effect presents
CSS 2.1 as the current CSS specification. Confused? You _will_ be after
hearing that although in general CSS 2.1 is the closest thing we have to
a de facto standard, some particular features there are not widely
supported. Note that CSS 2.0, which is still formally the W3C
Recommendation, does not contain the value pre-line.

I think (though am not sure) the 2 are not equivalent.

They surely aren't, since the CSS thing relates to rendering only, not
to submitted data.

The attribute wrap="off" is pointless, because the design of an
application that involves processing form data cannot reliably expect
and need not expect to have data processed the way that wrap="off"
suggests. Browsers might ignore the nonstandard attribute. Besides,
users can do something nasty like use a modified version of the form to
submit data. Hence, the form handler should be prepared to anything,
including arbitrarily long lines. It's a very small part of robust form
data processing to split lines if needed.