Re: NBSP supposed to stretch, right?

U+0020 SPACE
U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE

These two characters are equal in every way except that one of them
offers an opportunity for a line break and the other does not.

If the above statement is true, then any conformant application must
treat/process/display both characters identically.

Responding to Asmus Freytag,
> Now, if someone can show us that there are widespread implementations
that
> follow the above recommendation and have no interoperability issues
with HTML
> then I may change my tune.

Can anyone show us that there are widespread implementations which would
break if they started following the above recommendation?

Quoting from this HTML basics page,
http://www.htmlbasictutor.ca/non-breaking-space.htm

“Some browsers will ignore beyond the first instance of the non-breaking
space.”
and
“Not all browsers acknowledge the additional instances of the
non-breaking space.”

Fifteen or twenty years ago, we used NO-BREAK SPACE to indent paragraphs
and to position text and graphics.  Both of those uses are presently
considered no-nos because some browsers collapse NBSPs and because there
are proper ways now to accomplish these kinds of effects.

The introduction of browsers which collapsed NBSP strings broke existing
web pages.  Perhaps the developers of those browsers decided that SPACE
and NO-BREAK SPACE are indeed identical except for line breaking.

Are there any modern mark-up language uses of SPACE vs NO-BREAK SPACE
which would be broken if they follow the above recommendation?
Received on Wed Dec 18 2019 - 17:07:46 CST