[Web4lib] white space in web pages

[Thomas Dowling]

On 7/24/2006 12:52 PM, Nancy E. Sosna Bohm wrote:

> This post doesn't seem to have shown up during the technical difficulties on
> the list last week.
> 
> Has it become an acceptable practice to ftp html docs in binary instead of
> ASCII?
> 

I don't see how transferring HTML in binary could do anything more
serioius than leaving the final copy with Carriage Return-Line Feed
pairs at line ending instead of just Line Feeds.  As far as any browser
or other HTML parser is concerned, that just puts two whitespace
characters where one would have been, and since the browser will
collapse multiple whitespace characters into one space, it won't make a
difference.

As for scripts, I'm not aware of what could break with a CRLF instead of
a just a line feed.  But that may suggest a need to put your scripts in
separate .js files (which also simplifies HTML validation in a lot of
cases).

BTW, how have you confirmed that the HTML files are really being
transferred in binary?  I find it passing strange that Dreamweaver would
do something that loopy.


-- 
Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu