On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, Simon Fraser wrote:
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, fantasai
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The only obstacle here is your default stylesheet.
> Supposing you put this in a <style> element for every new document:
>
> p {
> text-indent: 2em;
> margin: 0;
> }
>
> A single return press corresponds to a new line, only it's indented
> to indicate a paragraph--which in the vast majority of cases, it is.
> There are no "empty lines" for users to click on and begin typing.
> Shift-return inserts a soft break (<br>).
This is he behaviour of Word processors, for example. (Although strange and
obscure ones like MS Word actually do leave some space in between
paragraphs).
Don't think that we didn't consider options like this in the early
days. We would have loved to have used this solution from the
beginning, but it suffers from the problem that CSS-impaired user
agents will still display the paragraphs with space between them. And
despite other protestations on this thread that HTML is never supposed
to specify the exact details of layout, we thought it an important
issue that the composer of a message would see no space between
paragraphs, but the receiver would. The addition of inter-paragraph
space could alter the meaning of the message in ways that we can and
cannot anticipate.
In addition, consider the (not insubstantial) set of people who insist
on writing HTML emails as if they were plain text, by hitting return at
the end of each line. On a non-CSS-savvy user reading agent, those
emails would all look double spaced. Bingo, we've just made that person
look like a real luser.
That person is a real luser. Typewriters are no longer made to assume that
people do that, let alone software on computers. And I was unaware that there
are people writing plain text emails who hit return at the end of each line
in any numbers - all the software I have used for writing mail does line
breaking for me, and I have been writing plain text mail for a long time.
(About 15 years - which is a lot longer than anyone, luser or no, has been
using Netscape to write mail)
As soon as the text written like this is rendered on a different sized
screen our luser looks like a luser anyway:
I thought you had a screen that went
for
the same nyumber of characters as mine
so
I used software that let me make the
assumption and encouraged me to look
like
I have no idea how to write plain text
mail.
Charles
Simon
--
Charles McCathieNevile mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
until 6 January 2001 at:
W3C INRIA, 2004 Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
