Providing a BR tag with a distinctive on-screen look (prior to the break happening)

Question

Providing a BR tag with a distinctive on-screen look (prior to the break happening)

After coming across this particular inquiry, I discovered that in the past, styling the line break (BR) tag with CSS was not possible. Nevertheless, thanks to the latest browsers, this limitation is a thing of the past now. My aim is to give certain line breaks a visual representation, similar to how old word processors would display a "show codes" mode showing the line break as a pi symbol.

Yet, I am encountering challenges in achieving the desired effect before the actual line break; it always seems to appear on the following line.

For instance, you can view a demonstration through this fiddle. Even though I set the content to be displayed prior to the line break, it still displays on the next line. I have also tried using background-image instead of content without success.

html css

Answer 1

Answer №1

Initially, if you reference the W3C specification for elements, it explicitly mentions:

Void elements
area, base, br, col, [...]

[...]

Void elements are unable to contain any content (since there is no closing tag, no content can be inserted between the opening and closing tags).

Nevertheless, attempting to incorporate a pseudo-element (:before) to it goes against this rule.

The ::before and ::after pseudo-elements serve the purpose of specifying generated content preceding or following an element's content.

This poses a problem. Frankly, I am surprised that your demo even functions, and I would consider it a flaw in the browser's interpretation of the standard. It might fail in future updates, so do not heavily rely on your current fix.

Despite that, here is how you can address this issue:

If you style the <br> with display:block, it will naturally act as a block-level element and initiate a new line, along with the contained :before pseudo-element.

To keep the br inline with your text, maintain it as an inline element, and then introduce the following to create the line break after your icon:

br:after {
    content: ' ';
    display: block
}

By doing this, only the :after pseudo-element will appear on a new line, while the remaining content of the br stays on the preceding line.

Check out the jsFiddle here

Note: This method does NOT function properly in FireFox. However, neither did your original code. At least in my example, the double
's display as an additional blank line, unlike yours.

Answer 2

Initially, if you reference the W3C specification for elements, it explicitly mentions:

Void elements
area, base, br, col, [...]

[...]

Void elements are unable to contain any content (since there is no closing tag, no content can be inserted between the opening and closing tags).

Nevertheless, attempting to incorporate a pseudo-element (:before) to it goes against this rule.

The ::before and ::after pseudo-elements serve the purpose of specifying generated content preceding or following an element's content.

This poses a problem. Frankly, I am surprised that your demo even functions, and I would consider it a flaw in the browser's interpretation of the standard. It might fail in future updates, so do not heavily rely on your current fix.

Despite that, here is how you can address this issue:

If you style the <br> with display:block, it will naturally act as a block-level element and initiate a new line, along with the contained :before pseudo-element.

To keep the br inline with your text, maintain it as an inline element, and then introduce the following to create the line break after your icon:

br:after {
    content: ' ';
    display: block
}

By doing this, only the :after pseudo-element will appear on a new line, while the remaining content of the br stays on the preceding line.

Check out the jsFiddle here

Note: This method does NOT function properly in FireFox. However, neither did your original code. At least in my example, the double
's display as an additional blank line, unlike yours.

Providing a BR tag with a distinctive on-screen look (prior to the break happening)

Answer №1

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