Question

Is there any alternative for bikeshedding CSS3 property? It doesn’t seem to be supported yet.

Answer 1

The white-space property

In CSS3, The white-space property is a shorthand for the white-space-collapsing (I guess bikeshedding means they don’t know what to call it yet) and text-wrap properties. The white-space property is a CSS 2.1 property supported by most browsers and there are two values for it that collapse new lines:

1. normal (The initial value).
2. nowrap

But what does collapsing line feed characters mean?

According to CSS 2.1:

If ‘white-space’ is set to ‘normal’ or
‘nowrap’, linefeed characters are
transformed for rendering purpose into
one of the following characters: a
space character, a zero width space
character (U+200B), or no character
(i.e., not rendered), according to
UA-specific algorithms based on the
content script.

According to CSS 3:

A zero width space before or after a
white space sequence containing a
newline causes the entire sequence of
white space to collapse into a zero
width space.

Reality:

Most browsers transform line feed characters into a space. So what you really want is to set the white-space-collapsing property to discard not collapse or to collapse and then add a zero width space character before the line break.

What to do till browser support

Remove white-space from your HTML document:

<span>A</span>
<span>B</span>

To:

<span>A</span><span>B</span>

Or:

<span>A</span><span>
    B</span>