[rfc-i] sourcecode indentation

[paul.hoffman at vpnc.org (Paul Hoffman)]

On 12 Feb 2016, at 15:52, HANSEN, TONY L wrote:

> A better example of outdent would be
>
> <sourcecode indent="-4">
>  foo
>    bar
>      baz
> </sourcecode>
>
> which would generate:
>
> <pre class="sourcecode">
> foo
> bar
>  baz
> </pre>
>
> in the HTML format.
>
> A more common variation might be where the input is coming from 
> elsewhere and you have no control over the indentation used there:
>
> <sourcecode indent="-4" src="http://URL to the source code"/>
>  or
>
> <sourcecode indent="16" src="http://URL to the source code"/>
>
> The use case for this is very specific, but probably not something 
> that would get used often.
>
> If you think you would find it useful, please speak up.

I will speak up against this idea. For sourcecode where indentation is 
important, seeing an example at the left margin might cause the reader 
to think that the code is in fact not indented. Your example above is a 
classic one: someone seeing that text would assume that "foo" and "bar" 
are at the same level when they are not. I would prefer not to have the 
RFC format have a display hinting mechanism that could be used to make 
examples harder to interpret.

--Paul Hoffman