Prefornatting HTML tags being removed from description? Why?

[Idealproductsales]

Hi. Have been away for a while, and I have been unable to find anything covering this issue.

Have been working with Ninja Lister and "training" myself on it again and have come across an odd issue (or maybe not so odd)

Frequently I will use <pre> </pre> Preformatting tags to make a block of text "stick" in a more viewer-friendly format (instead of dozens of <br> or <p> </p> for each line) while using Raw HTML editor..

However, upon upload to ebid, it appears those tags are being stripped out. Resulting in a lot of description being stuck all in one continuous line

is there some reason for that, and is there some work-around to it? (I prefer to NOT copy/paste to WYSIWYG as it can often result in some weird things showing up in the description where not wanted.. so I copy/paste the plain text and its line breaks into raw HTML and wrap it in <pre> tags. )

[JanetB]

eBid have been busy stripping out quite a few tags to accommodate better viewing on iphones, ipads etc
I have had to change all of my listings to delete table tags (not yet stripped from eBid but the iphone view is awful) and I am now using div tags which I am surprised to say works much better and is easy to use.

[Idealproductsales]

Yeah I can agree with that - especially considering bandwidth and size of the data packets - It would make a lot of sense to *allow* the <pre> tag though - it would cut down considerably on the automatic <p> </p> tag pairs that the WYSIWYG editor creates when trying to get *plain text* descriptions lined up

- I no longer use any kind of HTML code other than very basic <pre>, <p>, <br> and sometimes <strong> tags for that very reason (cell phone friendly)

Say 20 preformatted lines of 1300 characters..(including line breaks) With <pre> </pre> wrapper those will total 1311 characters of data.. But being forced to edit the description to actually come out clearly, those 1300 lines become 1440 characters of data (20 pairs of <p> </p> tags added) - that sort of difference may be small but when you are talking say 100 lines per listing average over 10,000 listings , it adds up to a lot of extra data transfer (bandwidth) that is simply un-necessary (and uses phone memory which as we know is usually at a premium)

Unfortunately that is going to be a show-stopper for me as I use <pre> a *LOT* in my listing descriptions... so unless I can find some alternative that works (Just tried <code> and <div style="white-space: pre;"> ) neither of which work so far.

[JanetB]

So you like to use the <pre></pre> tags for fixed-width font, and to preserve both spaces and line breaks

[Idealproductsales]

Yep. much quicker and side benefit is it uses fewer characters so , html files are just that much smaller, lighter, and load faster

[JanetB]

Try this:

<p style="line-height:1.5"><span style="font-family:courier; font-size:14pt">
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
<br />
And another quick brown dog jumps over another lazy dog.
</span></p>

[Idealproductsales]

Try this:

<p style="line-height:1.5"><span style="font-family:courier; font-size:14pt">
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
<br />
And another quick brown dog jumps over another lazy dog.
</span></p>

Umm, still have to add <br> tags and all that html adds even more to the data size than even <p> or <br> tags

The goal is not so much the formatting as it is to get the invisible line breaks to be recognized so each is on its own line..

For example, take Notepad and write 20 lines

line 1
line 2
line 3
========
line 20

and then copy and paste to the raw HTML (source) side of the editor and then switch back to WYSIWYG and your lines look like this:

line 1line 2line 3line 4line 5

Of course could copy/paste content to notepad first and then to the WYSIWYG (which automatically adds formatting HTML) but that is an extra step, and a lot of extra data.. copy and paste similar formatting (including fonts, styling, etc) from a web page direct to WYSIWYG also copies over all that formatting (undesireable, as the goal is for it to be plain text) - But the same content copy/pasted to the source (raw HTML) will preserve the visible line breaks, while eliminating the design elements of that data, leaving me with a plain text paste.. the problem is all the line breaks (could be hundreds of them and not visible in raw html) then have to be either converted to <br> tags , or wrapped in <pre> preformat .. and since <pre> is being stripped, I can't imagine having to type <br> 100 times or more per listing.. that'd take much too long.

Ultimately, <pre> tags work best for what I am trying to achieve, and use a LOT less data transfer (file size of the HTML) for the desired content.... but unfortunately at the moment they do not seem to be acceptable for some reason I cannot fathom. (less data size on a listing = more mobile friendly)

[JanetB]

I think the problem with pre tags is the fact that they don't size down to iphone viewability and users will have to scroll sideways - maybe that is why eBid blocked them?

[Idealproductsales]

I think the problem with pre tags is the fact that they don't size down to iphone viewability and users will have to scroll sideways - maybe that is why eBid blocked them?

Good point - While the text itself will size down (font size is not limited by pre tags, and they also force a monospace font), long lines won't wrap, causing a horizontal scroll issue (but that is actually the intent for my particular case - a wrap of a long line on some parts of the description could result in a lot of confusion.)

I suppose the only alternative would be to convert them to use <br> I suppose.. I can always copy/paste to note pad (to remove text decoration and other html around the text) and then paste THAT to the WYSIWYG editor which would automatically add <br> tags... Its the only solution I can come up with, but it does not help any when trying to import listings from other sources which already are blocked out in <pre> elements..

However, simply based on the feedback I get from "the other place" It does not seem to be a problem using <pre> tags - plenty of sales from mobile phone users seem to prove that out (approximately 23% of our sales are via smartphone users, according to "their" statistics.. and we do about 50-75 sales a DAY there 7 days a week.. some days in the busy season, it approaches 125+ a day.. and add to that , sales from the river, and website, and we stay busy.. )

However, on the other hand, it would only affect one's own listing if they are not used right..

[Idealproductsales]

I found a solution that may be workable (but it would have to be done by ebid in the listing box CSS stylesheet) that would allow <pre> element and still also allow text wrapping:

Solution 2: Text-Wrapping

We’re used to our source code wrapping to the next line if it’s wider than our code editor’s window. It wouldn’t be unusual to port this convention over to the Web.

Text-wrapping can be done using the white-space CSS property. There’s a nifty value for white-space that works well for preelements: pre-wrap.

pre {
    white-space: pre-wrap;
}