<pre> (was: Re: Classic ascii pics)

Ok there has been lots  of discussion and now I did some testing and
here are the results:

The problem was that on
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A525791
the html-tag <PRE> did not work to make the ascii art appear in a
monospaced font in any browser.

At first I compared the page source to the one I use on my own site and
found that I always have used <code><pre>. It has worked well in any
browser I have seen, but it is not correct as claimed in the html
standard:

Now, Eli the Bearded wrote:
> RFC 1866            Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0        November 1995
> 
> 5.5.2. Preformatted Text: PRE
> 
>    The <PRE> element represents a character cell block of text and is
>    suitable for text that has been formatted for a monospaced font.
> 
>    The <PRE> tag may be used with the optional WIDTH attribute. The
>    WIDTH attribute specifies the maximum number of characters for a line
>    and allows the HTML user agent to select a suitable font and
>    indentation.

I have downloaded A525791 and modified the source code to find out why
pre does not work there. I have to say: The code is ugly as hell. And
after a while I found the problem: 
 I do not know what editor created this web page, but it does not care
much about nesting <font> tags (there are 55!) in a sensible way. The
pre-block is inside at least one <font face="Arial,...> block. This
direction makes Netscape ignore the monospaced rule for the <pre>-tag.

If you close all <font>-statements before <pre> it seems to work fine in
every browser.

So I apologize for claiming <code><pre> was the right way to insert
ascii art into html and I will remove the <code>-tags from my pages.

BTW: <font size="+1"> may does not seem to be allowed inside <pre>, but
it seems to work.

Markus

PS: I recommend using the w3c html validator to check your html for
correctness:
 http://validator.w3.org/
It lists about more than 100 errors for the document above.