(technical) Re: [Newspoetry] Re: Newspoetry digest, Vol 1 #710 - 3 msgs

[Joe Futrelle]

Lynx's aberrant behavior results from an ambiguity in the HTML spec
(see explanation below).

So if you have

     <br>blah blah
     <br>yakkedy yak
     <br>
     <br>and so on

lynx will render it as

     blah blah
     yakkedy yak
     and so on

whereas given the same code, Netscape and IE will render it as

     blah blah
     yakkedy yak

     and so on

The workaround is to use paragraph breaks, like so:

    <br>blah blah
    <br>yakkedy yak
    <p>and so on

Given the HTML 4.01's specification of line break behavior:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#h-9.3.2.1

It seems clear that lynx doesn't consider there to be a "line of text"
to break when it sees two <br>'s in a row.  Accordingly, lynx renders
this code

   <br>blah blah
   <br>yakkedy yak
   <br>&nbsp;
   <br>and so on

as

     blah blah
     yakkedy yak

     and so on

because the &nbsp; constitutes a "line of text" and can thus be broken
with the following <br>.

On Mon, Jul 23, 2001 at 10:21:42AM -0500, gillespie william k wrote:
> I am very interested to know what in the HTML would change the way a
> stanza break appeared between lynx and a graphical browser. Lack of
> closing paragraph tags?
[snip]

--
Joe Futrelle
editor-upon-chief
Newspoetry dod com