On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 11:07 PM, David Bruant <[email protected]> wrote: > Writing the following is semantically sufficient and handles the > presentation as expected : > <code style="white-space:pre;"> > #include <stdlib.h> > int main(){ > return EXIT_SUCCESS; // Because we always succeed ! > } > </code>
This would break as soon as you met a client without CSS support, or with insufficient CSS support. > My proposition is to remove the <pre> element since it doesn't have > another semantic than "present the information as I did (white spaces, > line breaks)" That's actually very valuable semantic information. If whitespace is important, then the information about it as such should be carried with the document. For an extreme example, consider a block of python or haskell code - without the whitespace, it's simply a non-working program. > For the ASCII art use case, what is said about "an alternative > description" strongly reminds the alt attribute of the img element. > Perhaps ASCII art should be done inside of an <img> element. The <img> > element is probably the HTML element which has the closest semantic of > the ASCII artist intention. ASCII art is indeed semantically closest to <img> (it's just an image done in a different medium), but there's no way to actually use <img> as such. <pre> is the second-closest thing if you're going to include such a thing. ~TJ
