NavList:

George --

One thing to keep in mind is that the actual decisions concerning the layout of a web page are made in the web browser, e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc. Generally, these are in keeping with the HTML code served up by the website, but they can be over-ridden by local settings. Another idiosyncrasy that can be observed occasionally is that the browser can occasionally be forced to make a trade-off between completeness and accuracy vs. timeliness. In other words, when the server is slow in providing some portion of a page (an image, for example), the browser may proceed to render it showing only a placeholder. Sometimes, when this happens, the problem can be corrected by refreshing the page which causes it to be downloaded again and re-rendered.

What happened in the case you describe certainly seems strange. It appears fine in Firefox for me. Moreover, there is nothing in the HTML for that line (or in the proximate code) that would necessarily cause anything unusual.

Here is the HTML:

<p> B. Moon (near-limb) to Regulus (E. of Moon). 3 Dec. <pre>

chron. time (am) h m s lunar distance deg ' "
00 11 12 17 47 15
00 21 59 17 45 15
00 23 58 17 45 00
00 29 49 17 44 00
00 35 04 17 37 15
00 39 56 17 37 00
average 00 27 00 average 17 42 38</pre>

HTML is a "markup" language, that is, it "marks-up" the text, etc., to indicate its desired formatting, layout, etc. In the above example, the "<p>" is markup indicating the beginning of a paragraph. The next tag, "<pre>," meaning pre-formatted, means that the text up to the tag ending that section, "</pre>," is to be rendered exactly as entered, i.e., spacing and alignment exactly as in the HTML (otherwise, browsers ordinarily ignore multiple spaces, carriage returns, etc., between words). The <pre> tag is being used here to align the text and numbers in columns.

While there is nothing syntactically wrong with this, it might have been coded to make the intent clearer to the browser. For example, the initial paragraph might have been explicitly ended with a "</p>" instead of having the browser figure this out when it encountered the <pre> tag. While there is no obvious reason why this might affect only the line you mention, ambiguity sometimes leads to confusion.

Finally, most HTML authors would probably prefer to use a <table> structure to organize this type of information because of its tight control over rows and columns of data, its widespread use and demonstrated reliability.

Hope this helps.

Peter Hollings
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