For a while, it's frustrated me (and I'm sure some of my commenters) that indentation in comments is lost, particularly given the code snippets people often paste in.
I didn't want to make all comments pre-formatted so my first thought (which I implemented locally) was to add a boolean field on comments where a user could elect to have their comment pre-formatted. That would be annoying for the non-code parts of their comments, though. So my second thought (which I also implemented locally) was to have a toggle where a comment could alternatively be viewed as pre-formatted or not.
But in tweaking that I was reminded of the CSS2 property white-space. In particular, the value pre-wrap which honours multiple consecutive whitespace characters but still wraps to fit in the required width of the box. According to quirksmode.org it's not understood by FF2 or IE6/7. A value of pre might work in that case but the wrapping part of pre-wrap is really nice.
You can see it in action in the first comment of First Success With Combinatory Python (unless you are running FF2 or IE6/7).
If anyone knows of a simple fallback to pre I can do for those browsers, I would be interested in trying it.
The original post was in the categories: this_site web_design css but I'm still in the process of migrating categories over.
The original post had 9 comments I'm in the process of migrating over.