I am a great fan of white space on websites. It gives space for content to breathe.
Somehow it creates a more relaxed viewing experience.
Most importantly it makes text easily scannable. The importance of this can never be underestimated. - some short tips on making content easily scannable
Having said that I have a complaint about Wordpress, or in particular the text editor.
Pressing return often fails to create the desired whitespace. Even adding code in the html gets stripped away. I wanted to show the code that gets stripped away, but of course it gets stripped away. There must be a way to show code somehow.
Wordpress also seems to be inconsistent between adding a p tag and a br break tag, quite frustrating.
To create more whitespace I can add bigger margins to css code like li and ol
but I wonder whether there is a plugin / hack to be able to add whitespace?The frustrations of text editors, can sometimes leave you desiring to use non html based restructured text.
If anyone knows of improvements to the wordpress text editor I would be interest to know. I think in this regard I have to say the Blogger text editor is much better. Why? because you can easily switch from edit html to text editor and it doesn’t strip away your html additions. see: Wordpress vs Blogger
3 comments ↓
I think you’re missing some white space here: “add whitespace?The frustrations of text editors, can sometimes”
Picky points of pendantry aside, I would guess there are probably third party text editors capatible with WordPress—FCKEditor springs to mind as worth checking.
Also, what code are you using to add white space? One of the reasons it may not be working is that WordPress appears to be correctly programmed to strip out “non-semantic” markup—removing html used incorrectly for presentation rather than content.
“Soft-return” adds a break-tag (return with shift held down) btw—standard to almost every program.
And you could try wrapping a either a span or div tag around content you wish to space and then define some margin or padding, ie
Alternatively you define something similar in your site stylesheet, even make it default for the ol/ul tags.
You can show code by putting in it’s hex equivalent—try entering some code into Dreamweaver’s design view to see what I mean. And there is also an html tag that allows a batch of code to be displayed as is, in the same manner as a literal block in reSt, only I don’t remember off the top of my head what it is.
Funnily enough, my example code was stripped out of the comment. Get in touch if you need a hand.
There is a way to add code to your posts here.
Leave a Comment