oh, the anguish I suffer'd (too brainey?)
o'er information or miscellany..

most of the time text is formatted based on tags used to mark up that text. any extra whitespace (spaces, tabs, returns) that you put in your text (or copy and paste) are stripped out by the browser.

the exception to this rule is use of the preformatted text tag <pre>. any whitespace that you put into text surrounded by the <pre> and </pre> tags is retained in the final output. special note: use spaces, not tabs; different browsers assign different space values to tabs!

the catch is that preformatted text is usually displayed in a monospaced font such as Courier, so if you copy and paste something that's in a different kind of font you may not get what you want when various browsers display it.

if you use preformatting at all you should look at the results not only with your usual browser, but with another as well; e.g., try both IE and Netscape.

NOTE: for markup, substitute []s for <>s

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