Four Words: The Tab Key

[2010DigitalBoy]

[COLOR=Purple]Okay, I know it was a bad joke to put a grammatical error in the title but that's just what I'm complaining about here. A paragraph is meant to begin with an indention. Hitting the space bar repeatedly doesn't work and the tab key makes the page scroll down. This is really bothersome when posting a large bit of story in RPGs, or novel pieces in the literature section. Is there any way to make the tab key work?[/COLOR]

[Baron Samedi]

[size=1][COLOR=White]....[/COLOR]o_O I never thought that I would see a complaint like this. Is it really that important to you? Why must the paragraph begin with an indentation? Really, it seems like somewhat of a nitpicking request. We don't require perfect grammatical structure here at Otakuboards; I'm sure this semi-colon is in the wrong position - and that this extender is unnecessary. I do get what you're saying though, to a degree. I think it is unnecessary, but it would be nice if the space key worked. What I can't get over is that you're actually bothered by it.

[b]PS[/b]: My smart-*** indent was used with four ellipses and setting the colour to white.[/size]

[2010DigitalBoy]

[QUOTE=Baron Samedi][size=1][COLOR=White]....[/COLOR]
[b]PS[/b]: My smart-*** indent was used with four ellipses and setting the colour to white.[/size][/QUOTE]

[COLOR=Purple]I noticed, highlight it to see what it was.

Yes, it actually does bother me because every site seems to have the problem and whenever I try to copy and paste novel excerpts from Word, I have to doublespce each paragraph so they dont mush together. Takes forever.[/COLOR]

[Desbreko]

[color=#4B0082]Well, here's the problem: In standard HTML, without the use of CSS, it's impossible to indent a paragraph like you can in a word processor. (At least as far as I know.) When your browser encounters a tab in the web page's code (whether in the text of your post or elsewhere), it completely ignores it. Why? Because [i]all[/i] formatting is done through tags, including line breaks and paragraphs. Tabs in HTML code are used purely to arrange the lines of code into a more workable form.

Multiple spaces in a row also don't work, as browsers interpret multiple spaces in a row as just a single space. There is the &nb[i][/i]sp; code, which is a "non-breaking space," which the browser will interpret as multiple, consecutive spaces. But HTML would have to be allowed in order to use it in posts (which it is in the Arena I suppose), and that's both exceedingly bad form and inefficient.

So to answer your basic question, no, it's impossible to make the tab key work like you want it to.

As I mentioned, though, there is a way to indent paragraphs using CSS. It involves applying the text-indent property to the paragraph you want to begin indented. Getting this to work on OB would require adding a new vB tag and setting it to apply the proper HTML/CSS code around the paragraph enclosed in the tags. And I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing that, so it probably wouldn't be an especially simple matter. I'll probably at least look into it, though, since it interests me and I'd like to know how to do it.[/color]

[Semjaza]

I feel it does increase readability (I do it on my own site), but honestly, 99% of websites don't utilize indents on paragraphs. If it bothered you that much, you'd probably be going insane by now lol.

The way browsers are set up, pressing Tab brings you to the next element down the line. It wouldn't really help either way. Instead, as Desbreko was talking about, it would have to be enabled in the CSS somewhere. I am sure there would be ways to do it that are less complex than Desbreko is describing (such as id= or class= for any paragraph inputed by the user or whatever), but I don't exactly have the code right in front of me. Unlike what he's saying, that would obviously be forced, because allowing users to do it (as he was thinking) would just be a pain and a waste (why have something like that that most people would never use? It would just look odd for some people to use it and most to not).

I imagine James and Justin have more pressing matters, either way heh.

[sakurasuka]

[SIZE=1]I really don't think the few milimeters of space really matters, in all honesty. It sort of used to bug me, but I almost drove myself nuts. I realize now that text is just as readable, indent or not.

If you really must, then I'd suggest using Baron Samedi's method, lol.[/SIZE]

[Desbreko]

[color=#4B0082]Well, yeah, we could edit the CSS for the whole site to include indentation on all paragraphs. But there's a problem with that: When you make a post, it isn't inside paragraph tags in the page's code. The whole post is just in a single div tag, using only br tags for line breaks. So doing that wouldn't actually affect the posts.

In order to apply a style like this from the head to the posts, we'd have to change how the vB software formats posts into HTML. And again, I have no idea how to do that or if it's even possible. I could look around in the admin control panel, which I probably will some time, but I just don't see there being any good way to do this.[/color]

[Gavin]

[SIZE=1]Interesting, most interesting.

The only times I've never started a paragraph with an indent is when I'm writing a letter to someone, so I've never grown uncomfortable with the sight of an unindented. In all honesty if people began every paragraph with an indentation I think it would begin to irritate me, whether or not they would be correct in terms of structure. [/SIZE]

[Baron Samedi]

[size=1]Des, couldn't you apply a class to the div which the post is located in, and just set the indent from that? That's what I've done on LSN, and Tony has done it at WiP.[/size]

[Desbreko]

[color=#4B0082]Two problems with that method....

First, we run into the same problem as I mentioned in my last post. Those divs don't have a class applied to them to begin with, so there'd be no way to apply CSS to them without altering the way the board formats posts into HTML. We'd have to change it so that when you make a post, it sticks it in a div with a class instead of the plain div tag like it does now.

Second problem is, even if we could apply styles to those divs, the [i]entire[/i] post is in a single div. Meaning, if we applied the text-indent style to the div, it would only indent the very first line. All line breaks inside posts are just done through br tags, so the whole post would be recognized as a single paragraph inside the div, and thus only the first line would be indented.[/color]

[Ezekiel]

[SIZE=1]Seeing as I don't know anything about HTML:

Hug Monster, when writing by hand it is common English rule to write with an indent at the start of every paragraph and to not have spaces in-between paragraphs, so that's fine.

When typing, I have always been told (especially by my English teacher) that the same rules do not apply. For typing, ideally, block paragraphing should be used with a space of one line between each paragraph.

That's how I've always been taught, so if you're stressing over one English rule, don't, because it doesn't even seem to apply to typing.[/SIZE]