The missing html tab

January 23rd, 2008  |  Published in Internet, Thoughts  |  5 Comments

We’ve had HTML and websites for over a decade now, isn’t it about time we can start using tabs? There’s still no easy way to do this with HTML, which is why most websites have a space between each paragraph instead of a tab. There’s something backwards here. Let’s get a &tab;!

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  1. Tim Challies says:

    January 23rd, 2008 at 9:54 am (#)

    That’s what CSS is for…

    p
    {
    text-indent: 10px
    }

  2. Josh Sowin says:

    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:20 am (#)

    True. But most people don’t know that, and it’s not available in most html editors. A tab entity would make this available, just like it does in text encodings.

  3. Tim Challies says:

    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:39 am (#)

    I’d also have accepted as a reply, “Hey, thanks for letting me know about that CSS trick, Tim. I hadn’t ever heard of that one before.”

  4. Josh Sowin says:

    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:48 am (#)

    If I hadn’t already known about it and used it, that would have been my exact reply.

  5. The Gent says:

    July 30th, 2009 at 4:29 pm (#)

    Sorry for pointing out the obvious over a year later but text-indent only works as a first tab stop.

    Let’s say you want item1 [tab] item2 [tab] item3. Other than putting in a bunch of non-breaking spaces between them or using the hell out of spans I see no way of getting a tab effect without a tab entity. And if you could fake it, it would still be faked—not having the same semantic value as a true tab.

    Back to my search.

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