Menu
Many websites, with pre-generated HTML5-compliant boilerplate files, use two spaces. Visual Studio projects, such as ASP.NET MVC 3, default to using a tab.
Will one become the standard way of indenting HTML?
780
Many developers choose to use 4-space or 2-space indentation. In HTML, each nested tag should be indented exactly once inside of its parent tag. Place a line break after every block element.
Indent by two spaces per indentation level. Use all-lowercase for elements and attributes. Don't leave trailing spaces at the end of a line (except as needed for Markdown).
Adding Tab Space in HTML Unlike with HTML space, there is no particular HTML tab character you could use. You could technically use the 	 entity as the tab is character 9 in the ASCII. Unfortunately, HTML parsers will simply collapse it into a single space due to the whitespace collapse principle.
If you represent the indents using space characters (ASCII SP), then 2 spaces is 2 characters fewer than 4 spaces. If you allow TAB characters to be used, then (on Windows) a TAB indents by up to 4 spaces, so TAB characters result in fewer characters.
As nobody mentioned it, the Google HTML/CSS Style Guide and the W3School HTML(5) Style Guide recommend 2 spaces.
This article also brings an analysis of the effect of tabs vs spaces in the resulting file size.
59
Do not use tabs; use two spaces. Tabs are problematic because they can be a different width in different editors (and terminals, for that matter). Since whitespace is removed when you tidy your HTML before deployment, there is no ultimate bandwidth benefit to using tabs; they simply introduce a wildcard into your development experience.
Two spaces are emerging as the standard because they are “just enough” indentation to make the HTML clearly indented to most people's eyes, but because HTML tends to nest very deeply — much more deeply than one would commonly nest when programming — and anything more than two spaces tends to start pushing HTML off the right edge of an 80-column screen pretty quickly.
25
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
