On 6/23/06, Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com wrote:
So what to do with leading spaces? Well, one common and important use for leading spaces is to make some kind of chart or diagram, to indent elements so they fit together properly. HTML provides the <pre> tag for that: it overrides the default space-compressing behavior and PREserves all spaces, line breaks, etc. exactly as entered. So, if you knew HTML, you could make such a chart with <pre>, but what if you didn't? Well, with this markup, just try entering it and presto, it will work, because your leading spaces clue the parser into the fact that you want it to display with spacing preserved.
Thanks for this explanation. I don't quite follow the logical step that was made between "one common and important use" and "the way this should work", but, hey. In practice, in Wikipedia, this "common and important" use is basically never used - we certainly don't want ASCII art in our articles. A much more "common" use would actually be to allow quoting of other material. Grey box, border and indent: yes. Monospace and no word-wrap: no. As I say, on the rare instances that someone actually wants ascii art, they could always use <PRE> manually.
But yeah, that's just the way things work out. I seem to recall we had a discussion about a syntax element to make quoting easier recently, but nothing much came out of it.
Steve