I am having a problem with a table when I use the <pre> tab to format the cell's content.

        <table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="5" style="background-color: #F4F4F4; text-align: left;">
        <td style="background-color: red;">
        <pre>
1
2
        </pre>
        </td>
        <td style="background-color: blue;">
        <pre>
lots of text... columns width being too small doesn't matter
more text is down here
        </pre>
        </td>
        </table>

The cells refuse to be smaller then about 130px? The cell color's were added to make the problem apparent.

Am I misusing the <pre> tag somehow?

Thanks.

possibly.

The <pre> element is for displaying <pre>formatted text. What are you trying to use it for?

Originally Posted by chrishirst

What are you trying to use it for?

I'm trying to display pre-formatted text :P

Actually, what I'm wanting is to be able display code with line numbers on my website, like the "[code]" tag on this forum.

See there's nothing new here

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/html-f...play-code.html

Thank you! I didn't realize there was actually a "code" tag in HTML. I always thought the forum software parsed the tag and formatted it somehow..

The <code> element really does the same a <pre> element just with a different look.

the BBcode [code ] delimiters are parsed by the forum software and formatted server side.