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Halfbakery: Layout: Text
Tab Tag   (-1)  [vote for, against]
for increased readability

As far as I am aware, the only HTML tag we are allowed to insert into our annotations and ideas is the break rule. Is it possible to create a tab tag for use at the beginning of paragraphs?
You see, some ‘Bakers don’t use two carriage returns to break their paragraphs up. Without the ability to indent the first line of their paragraphs, this reduces some readability. I find this especially so when the last line of a paragraph extends the width of the annotation / idea column leaving no indication that the last paragraph has in fact ended and a new one is beginning.
-- sdm, Oct 24 2001

Either that or '    '

It wouldn't be a big kludge - not that many people would use it anyway.
-- sdm, Oct 24 2001


<bemusedly tabs around his entire screen several times> Have I ever told you how much I hate you waugsqueke? No? Well I do!
-- DrBob, Oct 24 2001


<ripping out hair> So how'd you do that? Null spaces don't work for me.
-- sdm, Oct 24 2001


Why can't you do a blank line between paragraphs when you're entering your annotation? Is it too hard to type? If you want this feature in CSS, then fair enough, it's a valid way to format text in principle (<p> tags define a new paragraph, not specifically a blank line). But blank lines make it far easier to read text in very wide paragraphs, such as you tend to get on web pages on 1024x768 screens.

I'm just bitter, because I thought this would be a fun game invoving GNU makefiles.
-- pottedstu, Oct 24 2001


I've given up on typography in HTML. The dashes are wrong, the spacing is wrong; the paragraph indentation is just one more stylistic drop in the bucket, and obsessing about it just will lead to one hack after the next.

Yes, inserting &nbsp;'s can make up for some things, but destroys the easy quotability of text, and in general, I think that's worth more than having one paragraph amidst a sea of badly spelled, badly worded ramblings indented just so. Save it for resources you control.
-- jutta, Oct 24 2001


CSS2's text-indent will help with this:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/text.html#propdef-text-indent

Best wishes
-- kram, Aug 30 2002


I'm sure I once accidentaly caused a first-line indent in CSS2 when trying to block-indent, but now I can't remember what I did.
And how are we indenting here RT and co.?
-- NickTheGreat, Aug 30 2002


IMHO, on a webpage, the blank line is the best means of separating paragraphs. It is much easier to read. Indentation simply doesn't give the eye enough to grab. The problem is getting people to be aware of the problem, and to adapt their habits.

Any other "fix" is going to run into problems, especially if it is an attempt at idiot-proofing. Imagine a system that automatically indents or double-spaces for every carriage return -- what havoc, when one of those perps who nervously hit Enter every time their line nears the edge of the input area comes along. Ew.

Anyway, indenting and all that magazine and newspaper style formatting is intended for magazines and newspapers, not for the stretchy, undefined space of a webpage that depends so much on the nature of the reader's hardware and software.
-- Flinders, Mar 14 2004



random, halfbakery