Hello, and sorry for the late response.
2004-04-01T05:41:02+03:00 fantasai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>>> But, as Ken has just clarified, with NBSP Louis' neck may be >>>> stretched rather uncomfortably, if not cut completely. Here is what I >>>> don't want to see (fixed width font required): >>>> >>>> Louis XVI was >>>> guillotined in >>>> 1793. >>> >>> This, however, is a matter of presentation rather than semantics, and >>> as such fitly belongs in the realm of presentational markup. In HTML, >>> one might specify <tt> </tt> to generate a fixed-width space. >> >> I disagree. Surely there is something SEMANTICALLY different about the >> space in "Louis XVI". One semantic difference is that it is >> non-breaking. But another one is that these words should not be split >> apart. An additional semantic distinction might be that they should be >> treated as one word for the purposes of word breaking algorithms. > non-breaking and non-stretching are presentational properties, not > semantic ones. They don't change the meaning of the space: it's still > just a space, not a hyphen or the letter "g". They don't affect > non-visual media; we don't break lines in spoken speech. "Louis XVI" > is semantically different from "Louis' head" because the former is a > bare noun whereas the latter is a noun phrase, but as far as the reader > is concerned, they're both separated with "a space". Whether the space > breaks or not or stretches or not has no effect on either the meaning > or correctness of the text. It only affects its (visual) aesthetic > quality. That is arguable. An aural user agent could pronounce "1, 2, 3" a bit different from "1, 2, 3" if there is a (say) thin space between the digits in the latter case. It could pronounce it quicker, for example. Alexander. -- Alexander Savenkov http://www.xmlhack.ru/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xmlhack.ru/authors/croll/
