bikeshedding CSS3 property alternative?

Question

Is there any alternative for bikeshedding CSS3 property? It doesn't seem to be supported yet.

Answer 1

The white-space property

In CSS3, The white-space property is a shorthand for the white-space-collapsing (I guess bikeshedding means they don't know what to call it yet) and text-wrap properties. The white-space property is a CSS 2.1 property supported by most browsers and there are two values for it that collapse new lines:

1. normal (The initial value).
2. nowrap

But what does collapsing line feed characters mean?

According to CSS 2.1:

If 'white-space' is set to 'normal' or 'nowrap', linefeed characters are transformed for rendering purpose into one of the following characters: a space character, a zero width space character (U+200B), or no character (i.e., not rendered), according to UA-specific algorithms based on the content script.

According to CSS 3:

A zero width space before or after a white space sequence containing a newline causes the entire sequence of white space to collapse into a zero width space.

Reality:

Most browsers transform line feed characters into a space. So what you really want is to set the white-space-collapsing property to discard not collapse or to collapse and then add a zero width space character before the line break.

What to do till browser support

Remove white-space from your HTML document:

<span>A</span>
<span>B</span>

To:

<span>A</span><span>B</span>

Or:

<span>A</span><span>
    B</span>

Answer 2

There's always the most obvious fix, which is to simply remove the whitespace in the HTML:

http://jsfiddle.net/F3Mdd/1/ - it's really easy, and it just works. From this:

<div>a</div>
<div>a</div>

to this:

<div>a</div><div>a</div>

Here's a more detailed answer.

To be honest, I always just remove the whitespace...

Answer 3

Another approach is simply to wait for this CSS3 feature and remove the whitespace by Javascript until then.

http://jsfiddle.net/rT4Dy/2/

$('[data-bikeshedding="discard"]').each (function () {
  var node = $(this);
  node.html (node.find ('> *').detach ());
});

Answer 4

If I'm understanding you correctly, you mean the text-spacing property.

As far as I can tell, there isn't a lot of support.