Non-breaking non-space in HTML

Question

I have a bowling web application that allows pretty detailed frame-by-frame information entry. One thing it allows is tracking which pins were knocked down on each ball. To display this information, I make it look like a rack of pins:

o o o o
 o o o
  o o
   o

Images are used to represent the pins. So, for the back row, I have 4 img tags, then a br tag. Works great... mostly. The problem is in small browsers, such as IEMobile. In this case, where there are may 10 or 11 columns in a table, and there may be a rack of pins in each column, IE will try to shrink the column size to fit on the screen, and I end up with something like this:

o o o
  o
o o o
 o o
  o

or

o o
o o
o o
 o
o o
 o

The structure is:

<tr>
    <td>
        <!-- some whitespace -->
        <div class="..."><img .../><img .../><img .../><img .../><br/>...</div>
        <!-- some whitespace -->
    </td>
</tr>

There is no whitespace inside the inner div. If you look at this page in a regular browser, it should display fine. If you look at it in IEMobile, it does not.

Any hints or suggestions? Maybe some sort of   that doesn't actually add a space?

---

Followup/Summary

I have received and tried several good suggestions, including:

• Dynamically generate the whole image on the server. Good solution, but doesn't really fit my need (hosted on GAE), and a bit more code than I'd like to write. These images could also be cached after the first generation.
• Use CSS white-space declaration. Good standards based solution, fails miserably in the IEMobile view.

What I ended up doing

hangs head and mumbles something

Yes, that's right, a transparent gif at the top of the div, sized to the width I need. End code (simplified) looks like:

<table class="game">
    <tr class="analysis leave">
        <!-- ... -->
        <td> <div class="smallpins"><img class="spacer" src="http://seasrc.th.net/gif/cleardot.gif" /><br/><img src="/img/pinsmall.gif"/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/><br/><img src="/img/pinsmall.gif"/><img src="/img/pinsmall.gif"/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/><br/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/><br/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/></div> </td>
        <!-- ... -->
    </tr>
</table>

And CSS:

div.smallpins {
    background: url(/img/lane.gif) repeat;
    text-align: center;
    padding:0;
    white-space: nowrap;
}
div.smallpins img {
    width:1em;
    height:1em;
}
div.smallpins img.spacer {
    width:4.5em;
    height:0px;
}
table.game tr.leave td{
    padding:0;
    margin:0;
}
table.game tr.leave .smallpins {
    min-width:4em;
    white-space: nowrap;
    background: none;
}

p.s. No, I will not be hotlinking someone else's clear dot in my final solution :)

Answer 1

You could try the css "nowrap" option in the containing div.

{white-space: nowrap;}

Not sure how widely that is supported.

Answer 2

I've got around this type of issue in the past by dynamically creating the entire image (with appropriate pin arrangement) as a single image. If you are using ASP.NET, this is pretty easy to do with GDI calls. You just dynamically create the image with pin placement, then serve to the page as a single image. Takes all the alignment issues out of the picture (pun intended).

Answer 3

Why not have an image for all possible outcomes for the pins? No Messing with layouts for browsers an image is an image

Generate them on the fly caching the created images for reuse.

Answer 4

What would make the most sense is changing out which image is displayed on the fly:

<div id="pin-images">
    <img src="fivepins.jpg" />
    <img src="fourpins.jpg" />
    <img src="threepins.jpg" />
    <img src="twopins.jpg" />
    <img src="onepin.jpg" />
</div>

Answer 5

Since you are using images anyway, why not generate an image representing the whole layout on the fly? You can use something like GD or ImageMagick to do the trick.

Answer 6

Add a "nowrap" in your td tag...

Answer 7

Since you're going for maximum compatibility, have you considered generating a single image representing the frame?

If you're using PHP you can use GD to dynamically create images representing the frames based on the same input that you would use to create the HTML in your question. The biggest advantage to doing this is that any browser which could display a PNG or GIF would be able to display your frame.

Answer 8

This has been up here for a while, but I was just going through this and found this post. No matter what I did, I could not get images to go in a row. No matter what, they would wrap. I tried everything.

Then I figured out that there is a setting on the client where they can select the view as 1) Single Column, 2) Desktop View, and 3) Fit Window. According to MSDN, the default is supposed to be to fit window. But my Wife's IE Mobile phone was defaulting to Single Column. SO NO MATTER WHAT, it would wrap everything into a single column. If I switched to any of the other 2 options it looked fine.

Well, you can set this with a meta tag:

<meta name="MobileOptimized" content="320">

will set the page width to 320px. Don't know how to make it go to auto, if anybody out there knows, please post.

This does NOT work on blackberry's prior to v4.6 - you're stuck with single column unless the user manually changes to desktop view. With 4.6 or later, the following is supposed to work but I haven't tested:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320">

Answer 9

You might need an actual space immediately following the semi-colon in  

Answer 10

Try it with the <div> tag on the same line as <td>...</td>

Answer 11

I may have misunderstood what you are after but I think that you can do what I've done for logos on a map.

The map background tile is drawn then each image is told to float left and given some interesting margins so that they are positioned as I want them to be (view source to see how it's done).

Answer 12

Use the word joiner character, U+2060 (i.e. ⁠)

Answer 13

Maybe this is just one case where you could use tables to enforce layout. It's not optimal, and I know you aren't supposed to use tables for things that aren't tabular, but you could do something like this.

<table>
<tr>
<td><img src="Pin.jpg"></td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td><img src="Pin.jpg"></td>
<td>&nbsp;></td>
<td><img src="Pin.jpg"></td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td><img src="Pin.jpg"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td><img src="Pin.jpg"></td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td><img src="Pin.jpg"></td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td><img src="Pin.jpg"></td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td><img src="Pin.jpg"></td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td><img src="Pin.jpg"></td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td><img src="Pin.jpg"></td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
</table>

Answer 14

Do you have tried to define a width for the column? Like <td width="123px"> or <td style="width:123px">. And maybe also for the div ?

Answer 15

• There's the nobr html tag; not sure how well-supported this is, though.
• You could use css overflow:visible and non-breaking spaces between your elements (images), but no other whitespace in the html for those lines.

Answer 16

Have separate images for every possible arrangement of each row.

That would only require 30 images (16+8+4+2)

Answer 17

You can replace img with span and use a background image with each span, depending on a css class:

<p class="..."><span class="pin"></span><span>&nbsp;</span><span class="pin"></span>...
<p class="..."><span class="pin"></span><span>&nbsp;</span><span class="pin"></span>...
<p class="..."><span class="pin"></span><span>&nbsp;</span><span class="pin"></span>...
<p class="..."><span class="pin"></span><span>&nbsp;</span><span class="pin"></span>...

(personnaly I think it's better to have 4 line with a p tag instead of a single div with br)

The in CSS you can have something like this :

p.smallpins {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    height: 11px;
    font-size: 1px;
}
p.smallpins span {
    width: 11px;
    background-image: url(nopinsmall.gif);
    background-repeat: ...
    background-position: ...
}
p.smallpins span.pin {
    background-image: url(pinsmall.gif);
}

Answer 18

Would it not be easier if you do it like this?

<div id="container">
  <div id="row1">
    <img/><img/><img/><img/>
  </div>
  <div id="row2">
    <img/><img/><img/>
  </div>
  <div id="row3">
    <img/><img/>
  </div>
  <div id="row4">
    <img/>
  </div>
</div>

Whereby your CSS would handle the alignment?

.container div{
  text-align:center;
}