Styling tab sizes

[Grabeorama]

Is there a way of defining the width of a tab in CSS?I'm using

<xmp></xmp>

tags to display some HTML code on my site, but the tabs are about 8 spaces wide. Is there a way of lowering that to 4 spaces?

[jeffman]

Nope. Note that the xmp tag is deprecated in HTML5. But using the pre tag won't solve the problem either.Here's an alternative. Use a div or p tag, and in CSS style it like this:

div.pre {   white-space: pre-wrap;}

I just discovered that trick a couple days ago, and it solved a really nagging problem I was having with formatted text in a table cell.

[Grabeorama]

Ok thanks, but how would I keep the non-parsing of HTML code in <pre> tags?

[jeffman]

1. I'm not recommending <pre> tags2. I don't understand the rest of the question.

[Grabeorama]

Basically all I wanted was a method to display HTML code on a site, without it being interpreted as HTML or without using the "<" code. So I used the <xmp> tags. The only problem was the tabs were much too wide, and looked a little stupid so I wanted to decrease their size in CSS, but I don't think it's possible.Is there any other way of doing this?

[jeffman]

Oh, I see now. Well, <pre> tags are now recommended over the <xmp>, but I don't think you can control the way tabs are formatted, and changing the tag to pre won't make a difference. I agree it's annoying.Maybe you want to look into a server-side library that reformats things designated as code so they look like code. I have such a plugin on my wordpress site, and it looks great, but of course it's for wordpress. I can't imagine there's nothing similar for ordinary pages.

[Grabeorama]

Hmm, yeah I was trying to avoid complicating it too much with server side libraries. I like to have coded everything myself so if something goes wrong I have a much better chance of fixing it. I'll look into it though, there's surely a few PHP libraries out there that do what I'm looking for. Thanks for the help