Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi,
This is our last chance to change this behavior. We've found several places where having meaningful spaces are counter-productive:
* in table cells since we can't align table anymore. For example:
|= column1 |= column2 | this is some para | second column | hello | world
(not sure this will be rendered nicely in mail but you see what I mean)
* in scripts since having meaningful spaces prevents us from aligning velocity or groovy scripts. For ex we can't write:
#if (....) #if (...) do something # end #end
To see a better example have a look at http://tinyurl.com/ahz669
What I think users real want are meaningful new lines but I see cons overweighting pros for having meaningful white spaces. Thus I'm think we should strip whitespaces at beginning and end of lines including for line breaks. I'm slightly less sure for multiple spaces between words but even there I think we could strip them have users use {{{ }}} to put a non breaking space for ex (or introduce a {{space/}} macro or another special syntax although I'd rather we don't introduce a new syntax).
I think that users want WYSIWYG spaces to be meaningful, but this isn't necessarily the same as wiki spaces. We should have a way to represent nbsps in the wiki syntax, and not keep all spaces as meaningful. Although the code will be bigger, it will allow wiki syntax users to format the source code as they want, and it will allow WYSIWYG users to format the result as they want. +1 for making spaces non-meaningful. +0.5 for ~{space} as a nbsp placehodler. +0 for {{{ }}} as a meaningful space marker. The question for {{{ }}} is how do we represent it in HTML? - <tt> with white-space: pre from css; -- Special care must be taken in the WYSIWYG to automatically split it in two when the user starts typing text inside, special care to remove the element once the user deletes all the spaces, special care to join two adjacent blocks, etc. - A series of nbsps, and the renderer/parser take care to transform from and to {{{ }}}. As for new lines, if we want to keep them meaningful, a good trick is to end velocity lines with ##, as this causes the EoL to be considered part of the comment. -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/