I'm writing something which is mainly preformatted text but with
lots of links on individual characters, so the source lines are
likely to be a few thousand characters long for a display no more
than 80 characters wide.  The code uses only a very small subset
of HTML 4.0 strict, no funny tricks at all.

Will that make any commonly used browser barf?  Will any search
engine think "almost everything on that page is invisible so it
must be suspicious"?

==== j a c k  at  c a m p i n . m e . u k  ===  <http://www.campin.me.uk> ====
Jack Campin, 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland == mob 07800 739 557
CD-ROMs and free stuff:  Scottish music, food intolerance, and Mac logic fonts

On Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:13:51 +0000, Jack Campin - bogus address wrote:

> I'm writing something which is mainly preformatted text but with lots of
> links on individual characters, so the source lines are likely to be a
> few thousand characters long for a display no more than 80 characters
> wide.  The code uses only a very small subset of HTML 4.0 strict, no
> funny tricks at all.
> 
> Will that make any commonly used browser barf?  Will any search engine
> think "almost everything on that page is invisible so it must be
> suspicious"?

I think I'd try using CSS "whitespace: nowrap" instead of PRE and put 
each URL on a new line. Your source code would be a hell of a lot easier 
to read and edit too.

I don't think browsers care about line lengths. They'd have broken long 
ago if they did. I don't see why search engines should worry - if they're 
that clever they should know that URL text isn't display text.

Google might be funny about a page that just looks like a list of links, 
though, for other reasons.

-- 
Anahata
anahata@treewind.co.uk  ==//== 01638 720444
http://www.treewind.co.uk ==//== http://www.myspace.com/maryanahata

On 23 Feb, 15:13, Jack Campin - bogus address 
wrote:
> I'm writing something which is mainly preformatted text but with
> lots of links on individual characters, so the source lines are
> likely to be a few thousand characters long

> Will that make any commonly used browser barf?  

No, but it might make the users complain!

I'm doing much the same thing, and I pre-process my input content to
force line breaks every 72 chars, if needed.

The reason I stick with <pre> is that half of my entries are
already pre-formatted with linebreaks I want to preserve, but half
aren't. Unfortunately there's no simple way to tell if I'm seeing
log4j output (formatted) or human input (unformatted).