CSS tab-size
Written by David Walsh on March 20, 2013 · 2 Comments
The ridiculous tabs vs. spaces debate within code can get just as heated as the JavaScript semi-colon debate. I'm a tab guy myself but to each their own...just don't work on a project with me if you aren't. Anyways, I was quite surprised to find that you can set the tab space number of <pre> element code with CSS's tab-size property!
The CSS
The tab-size property takes an integer value representing the number of spaces a tab represents:
/* 4 spaces per tab */
pre {
tab-size: 4;
}
/* No indentation */
pre {
tab-size: 0;
}
As you can see, you could even remove indentation all together. Not recommended but possible.
I love this property as it's especially useful for code-heavy blogs, though it doesn't have much use outside of that.
Didn’t know about that.
It’s so basic that I wouldn’t be surprised if that was defined in CSS1.
But it’s a recent thing it seems, and still vendor prefixed. No sign of support in IE, as Microsoft stubbornly thinks that tabs are as huge as 8 spaces!
For vendor prefixes and browser support comparison: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/CSS/tab-size