Tab space instead of multiple non-breaking spaces ("nbsp")?

It depends on which character set you want to use.

There's no tab entity defined in ISO-8859-1 HTML - but there are a couple of whitespace characters other than   such as  ,  ,and  .

In ASCII, 	 is a tab.

Here is a complete listing of HTML entities and a useful discussion of whitespace on Wikipedia.


It's much cleaner to use CSS. Try padding-left:5em or margin-left:5em as appropriate instead.


No, Tab is just whitespace as far as HTML is concerned. I'd recommend an em-space instead which is this big (→| |←) ...typically 4 spaces wide — and is input as  .

You might even be able to get away with using the Unicode character (" ") for it, if you're lucky.

  • Here is a list of Space characters and “zero-width spaces” in Unicode.

  is the answer.

However, they won't be as functional as you might expect if you are used to using horizontal tabulations in word-processors e.g. Word, Wordperfect, Open Office, Wordworth, etc. They are fixed width, and they cannot be customised.

CSS gives you far greater control and provides an alternative until the W3C provide an official solution.

Example:

padding-left:4em

..or..

margin-left:4em

..as appropriate

It depends on which character set you want to use.

You could set up some tab tags and use them similar to how you would use h tags.

<style>
    tab1 { padding-left: 4em; }
    tab2 { padding-left: 8em; }
    tab3 { padding-left: 12em; }
    tab4 { padding-left: 16em; }
    tab5 { padding-left: 20em; }
    tab6 { padding-left: 24em; }
    tab7 { padding-left: 28em; }
    tab8 { padding-left: 32em; }
    tab9 { padding-left: 36em; }
    tab10 { padding-left: 40em; }
    tab11 { padding-left: 44em; }
    tab12 { padding-left: 48em; }
    tab13 { padding-left: 52em; }
    tab14 { padding-left: 56em; }
    tab15 { padding-left: 60em; }
    tab16 { padding-left: 64em; }
</style>

...and use them like so:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
        <title>Tabulation example</title>

        <style type="text/css">
            dummydeclaration { padding-left: 4em; } /* Firefox ignores first declaration for some reason */
            tab1 { padding-left: 4em; }
            tab2 { padding-left: 8em; }
            tab3 { padding-left: 12em; }
            tab4 { padding-left: 16em; }
            tab5 { padding-left: 20em; }
            tab6 { padding-left: 24em; }
            tab7 { padding-left: 28em; }
            tab8 { padding-left: 32em; }
            tab9 { padding-left: 36em; }
            tab10 { padding-left: 40em; }
            tab11 { padding-left: 44em; }
            tab12 { padding-left: 48em; }
            tab13 { padding-left: 52em; }
            tab14 { padding-left: 56em; }
            tab15 { padding-left: 60em; }
            tab16 { padding-left: 64em; }

        </style>

    </head>

    <body>
        <p>Non tabulated text</p>

        <p><tab1>Tabulated text</tab1></p>
        <p><tab2>Tabulated text</tab2></p>
        <p><tab3>Tabulated text</tab3></p>
        <p><tab3>Tabulated text</tab3></p>
        <p><tab2>Tabulated text</tab2></p>
        <p><tab3>Tabulated text</tab3></p>
        <p><tab4>Tabulated text</tab4></p>
        <p><tab4>Tabulated text</tab4></p>
        <p>Non tabulated text</p>
        <p><tab3>Tabulated text</tab3></p>
        <p><tab4>Tabulated text</tab4></p>
        <p><tab4>Tabulated text</tab4></p>
        <p><tab1>Tabulated text</tab1></p>
        <p><tab2>Tabulated text</tab2></p>

    </body>

</html>

Run the snippet above to see a visual example.

Extra discussion

There are no horizontal tabulation entities defined in ISO-8859-1 HTML, however there are some other white-space characters available than the usual &nbsp, for example; &thinsp;, &ensp; and the aforementioned &emsp;.

It's also worth mentioning that in ASCII and Unicode, &#09; is a horizontal tabulation.

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