Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

Dean Harding — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 07:32:00 GMT

So the reason it's being moved currently is to ensure it renders correctly in Firefox and Opera, is that right?

Personally, I'd say screw that - stick to the standard, treat them as the same and keep the formatting in-tact.

I'd say it's more important to keep the formatting in-tact than it is to make sure the page renders properly on every browser -- after all, it's the problem of the browser developer to ensure the browser is standards-compliant (and failing that, the website developer to ensure everything looks the same on each browser).

Just my $0.02..

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

Søren Lund — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 07:53:00 GMT

I say stick with the standard even more so because I actually expect it to behave the way IE renders it.

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

Julian Harse — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 08:43:00 GMT

It is just a bug which will get fixed and it will eventually get fixed. You are better off just sticking to the standard...

Interestingly, with an XHTML DOCTYPE, FireFox renders each "Foo" the same.

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

Michael Teper — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 08:50:00 GMT

Text formatting and rendering are different topics. Please keep text formatting as typed!

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

Jeff Parker — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 13:48:00 GMT

Please Please Please stick with standard.

BTW please work with the asp.net controls team. Most of the code from the controls simply will not validate. by the w3c validator. XHTML that is. I have never understood why people can go so strictly to the standard of XML but never follow the standards of HTML Google reports 4,285,199,774 web pages that it searches currently. Now Imagine if XML Standards was treated as willy nilly as the HTML standard is. Every XML document would be basically worthless. No real common way to get data in. The Microsoft XML Namespace would be worthless since it would only talk to other microsoft xml documents. It is time to start fixing abused html. It can be fixed and has been clearly defined in XHTML as far as sintax and quotations and case. But MS being the biggest software company right now can only help by forcing it as well.

Also out of those 4,285,199,774 web pages I would love to know how many of them have had to have multiple versions because of browser not following the standards.

And one more thing call me crazy but I remember back in the days IE 4 came to life. It was originally the geeks, the developers who started the revolution to IE. Why because IE 4 followed simple standards better than Netscape. There is a big shift now off to firefox, why, they support html standards much better and much stricter. I know when I finally seen IE 4 I personally told several people to upgrade to it. Before all they used was Netscape. There really wasn;t another competing browser IE 3 was terrible. Win the developers by not deviating from standards so we do not have to do more work just to get something simple like html to work properly and you going to come out on top smiling.

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

b.gr — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 14:43:00 GMT

<Comment mode="Standard zealot">This HTML fragment is not valid.</Comment>

Anyway, adding the required tags makes no difference (nor the XHTML doctype Julian Harse mentioned) so it is a bug in the other browsers - doesn't happen often, eh? So, keep with the standard when possible but leave the code as typed :)

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

Shannon J Hager — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 15:36:00 GMT

Stick to the standard and assume that Firefox will correct any rendering bugs it has. And hope that IE will do the same. You should not assume that the standards will change to conform with a browser bug, you should assume the bugs will be corrected to conform with the standard(s).

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

c.a. — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 18:24:00 GMT

Leave the code as the developer wrote it. Please don't mess with our code in a way where you think you are helping us out. If you want to include xhtml validators and such in the IDE that would be great, but if a developer writes a conforming page or not is up to the developer ( although I highly stress sticking to standards when writing markup ).

Nothing is more frustrating, and almost insulting than when the code you just wrote gets changed around because the IDE thinks it's helping out.

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT) — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 21:02:00 GMT

Let me clarify this a bit. Don't wprry, existing code formatting WILL NOT change. However, new (or heavily changed) markup may be formatted not the way you expect since we may be too careful with white space significance.

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

bigor — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 06:47:00 GMT

it's a MOZILLA BUG, Duh! :)

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

Suggestion — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 12:47:00 GMT

Why don't you let the user decide if they want their code to be reformatted? VS.net gives you the option, and then ignores your selection. I find it hard to believe that you can't understand why people call that a bug.

BTW -- You could always add a CodeSweeper function, like in HomeSite, and let people manually decide if they want formatting & error checking help.

$.02

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

bg — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 23:25:00 GMT

I apologize if this is slightly off topic but I was trying to write an addin to solve the html rewrite issue when switching between design view and html view. it's no problem to hook the edit > advanced > format document option using the guid:
{1496a755-94de-11d0-8c3f-00c04fc2aae2}
and the command id: 319. However this is not the proper hook to get the behavior to stop when the design tab is clicked from the html tab. I was wondering if you could provide me with the guid and command id for that event as I could not find a list of guids and cmdIDs for VS2003. Thanks.

re: Whitespace significance. To standard or not to standard or 'don't change my HTML again!'

Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT) — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

Your HTML is reformatted not because of some formatting code that you cannot turn off. Have a look here:

http://weblogs.asp.net/mikhailarkhipov/archive/2004/05/16/132886.aspx

It also provides a link to an articale that describes how to format HTML on view switch if you want to fix it. But you cannot make VS stop modifying it.