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Comment by demallien | Hacker News Reader

Hey! Put some carriage returns in there! You're screwing up the page rendering...

Not his fault that "pg" hasn't implemented something along the lines of:

  pre {
      overflow: scroll; /* currently set to hidden. Why? */
      width: /* something reasonable */
  }

A little CSS goes a long way for usability.

I think he did that so that things like code, which are messed up by wrap-around, can be presented cleanly.

"overflow: scroll" doesn't force a line-wrap. What you're thinking of is the "white-space" property.

That could be, but there's got to be a solution that doesn't force me to set my browser window to 1920 pixels wide to get rid of the horizontal scroll bar.

Sounds like a job for user preferences.

Thought you were going to say "Sounds like a job for big government!" :-) only joking

Most code examples are ok. The problem is that users use it for quotes. Perhaps a better solution would be to support the <blockquote>

See this thread on the feature-request perma-story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229095

PG previously added a fix I suggested that, at least in FF2, had the nice quality of clipping PRE areas to whatever your browser width is, while enabling a horizontal scrollbar for the PRE when you moused in.

Unfortunately, this never worked quite right in other browsers, and doesn't work in FF3. In my experiments, the only way to get the same desirable effect in FF3 is with a DIV-based layout. (There might be some DOCTYPE voodoo that would make it work with TABLEs, but I haven't found it.)

So as far as I can tell: the best fix requires a change to the News.YC/arc HTML generation.

    <code style="overflow: scroll; width: 40em;"><font color="#5a5a5a">  * Privatization of large public
     **snip**
       by a gigantic war-mongering government.
     </font></code>

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