Why did they deprecate the width attribute for preformatted text?

Question

The width attribute for <pre>, which defines maximum character length per line, was deprecated in HTML 4.01, and I no longer see it in current draft of HTML5. I couldn't find the reason behind it in the mailing lists of W3C's WG for HTML (maybe I searched wrong), although the specs for 4.01 said it was not supported in all clients.

1. One possible answer: it makes no sense to wrap preformatted texts. Is this true?
2. In case I still want it to wrap after for example 30 characters. Besides scripting, how do I achieve this?

Answer 1

HTML is for defining the structure of a document, not for styling of it. And there is a similar CSS property called width.

Answer 2

Presentational defining attributes were deprecated in favor of CSS. You should not rely on size, width, height attributes but instead focus on semantics when doing the markup. ( Though one exception is probably the img element for preload rendering purposes ).

Answer 3

Not a conclusive answer, but it looks like it was deprecated because it was never properly supported (and because it's a presentational concern, and therefore not really something HTML should contain)....

Take a look at it's mention in the HTML 4.01 spec, it mentions it's not widely supported and that it's used to "select an appropriate font size or indent appropriately"--which sounds pretty far off from "defines the number of characters per row".

The normal reason for these old HTML elements/attributes to go away is that they're better aligned with CSS than HTML--HTML is supposed to be just content, not presentation.

Answer 4

Well, for one, you'd want to separate content from presentation , and in the case of <pre>, the width is purely presentational. Furthermore, it makes little sense to wrap preformatted text, as you point out. You can do that in CSS if you really want to:

pre {
    width: 30em;
    white-space: pre-wrap;
}