| Type: | "normal", "nowrap", "pre", "forced" |
|---|---|
| Inherited: | yes |
| Used By: | All block elements |
| Default: | "normal" |
How to handle whitespace inside a paragraph.
The standard value is "normal", which means text can break at white-space (or wherever text is allowed to break, depending on the current language) as normal.
The "nowrap" value prevents line breaks from happening inside the block. On HTML pages, this can result in text overflowing the width of the page and a horizontal scrollbar appearing. In pdf documents, there is no scrollbar, and text will merrily disappear off the right hand side of the page if this is not used carefully.
The "pre" value causes spaces and newlines to be preserved. This is typically used by the pre element to achieve it's formatting.
The "forced" attribute causes words to be split at any point, not just on spaces. This is not a standard part of CSS2 but can still be useful in some situations.
The attribute "whitespace" (without the hyphen) is a synonym.
These two rules are defined in the default stylesheet
nobr { white-space:nowrap; }
pre { white-space:pre; }