Design & Publishing . / . WEB . / . Pixelsmith . / . Beware the Single Pixel-Trick . / . Work-arounds...

The single pixel gif?
(continued)

Work-arounds for spacing

.
Many designers have now begun to use the 'non-breaking space' as a means of delineating space. Using this tag along with type size parameters can affect the same results as the single pixel trick. Only now, it's all in the streaming HTML. You're right, the browser still has some work to do, but we've eliminated the call to any other directory, and the actual placement and rendering of any other files.
__ This works for letter-spacing as well as word and paragraph spacing. Enter a non breaking space, ( ), then set its size to adjust the white space. Enter it at the end of a passage, set it to a larger size, and it will control your line spacing. (Leading, as its called.)

This space is set to 16 pixels hspace: (   )
.

Other Tricks

__ Other tricks are in widespread use. Underscores (like we're using here today), periods and other characters can be colorized to match the background, then sized for the appropriate spacing. This looks like an elegant solution, however the color-text tag is not supported by all browsers... beware. Others that do support the tag, don't support it for printing. A recent test of the AOL 3.0 browser surprised us when it saw the color perfectly (white underscores on a white background) however printed it out as black along with the other text. Very strange.
__ Spacing can also be accomplished through table manipulations. Try 'dummy' cells that form wider line or column spacing. Experiment with padding and spacing commands. Since tables are now considered acceptable HTML, they build very rapidly in most browsers. Some browsers don't like empty table cells, so consider adding a <&nbsp;> or another device like a single underscore set to the smallest size within the cell. Remember too that defining the entire table width will be more reliable than defining the cell width.
__ For peace of mind, the main-stream browsers now do a fair job of interpreting HTML 3.0. You're usually safe with tables, text colors, background colors, and many of the tags like the <&nbsp;> which we are advocating here. We suspect the other browsers will follow suit soon. What we have to watch out for are the future revs of Netscape and MSIE, because as formatting styles become commonplace, all browsers will be forced to become more strict about supporting 'proper' html. Some of the jack-leg fixes we've become used to will no longer be tolerated.

Previous: Do a little testing

Thanks for reading.

In our next whitepaper, we'll investigate the intracies of building
sophisticated 5th Generation web pages using complicated table arrays.

Design & Publishing . / . WEB . / . Pixelsmith . / . Beware the Single Pixel-Trick