Use of <text:s> versus &nbsp;

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

In the call today, we managed to deep-end into the problem of whitespace collapse (a special provision for text in paragraph-content).  That is separate from the business about ignored whitespace, which applies when text in paragraph-content is not being contributed.

It has always struck me as odd that when there is a run of spaces, such as "   ", the preservation of that spacing is accomplished via " <text:s><text:s>".  This has exactly the wrong behavior in terms of &nbsp; used in HTML text content.

In all of the HTML editors that I have used, when I manually provide multiple spaces (such as the two spaces after a full-stop that I habitually type), the &nbsp; insertions happen at the beginning, not the end.  That is, in the above example, it would be "&nbsp;&nbsp; ".

The effect in rendering is quite useful.  If non-breaking rendering would cause any of those spaces to appear beyond the right margin, line wrap happens after the last space (which allows breaking) and the fact of spaces being unseen beyond the right margin is invisible.  There are no strange situations with spaces at the beginning of the next line.  This seems to be consistent behavior across all HTML browsers.

 - Dennis