On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 1:51 PM, Daniel Holbert <dholb...@mozilla.com> wrote: > Hi folks, > > Boris Zbarsky and I ran across a "not reflecting reality" issue in the > WHATWG HTML spec. > > The spec currently defines the rendering of the <br> element as follows: > # br { content: '\A'; white-space: pre; } > Source: > http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/rendering.html#phrasing-content-1 > > This CSS implies that <br>'s rendering could be customized by CSS, which > in practice (in the browsers that I tested[1]) is not actually the case.
We talked this over in the CSSWG meeting, and came up with a proposal for non-magical styling that is still very close to current behavior in all browsers: br { display-box: contents; content: "\A"; white-space: pre; } This lets you adjust the size of the <br> with text-styling properties, and use display:none to hide it entirely. Any/all of these can be set to !important if necessary for compat. ~TJ