1184266 - Add an 80-column indicator to the <pre> box styling when editing

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

What problem would this feature solve?
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This would help contributors format their code to be easier to read and compliant with Mozilla coding style.

Who has this problem?
=====================
All contributors to MDN

How do you know that the users identified above have this problem?
==================================================================
Dietrich brought this issue up -- we have a lot of samples with code that has to be scrolled horizontally to read it. And on Mac, the default is invisible scrollbars, so it just looks like the code is broken.

How are the users identified above solving this problem now?
============================================================
Scrolling horizontally -- if they realize they can.

Do you have any suggestions for solving the problem? Please explain in detail.
==============================================================================
Should be pretty easy to put together some CSS and script for this; check editor settings to see if it has support already for this.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================

Comment 1

[Stephanie Hobson [:shobson]]

I bet we can accomplish this relatively easily with a background gradient only applied in the editor.

It might also be possible to force display of the scrolls bars. Dear Apple, Please stop breaking the web - xoxo.

Comment 2

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

(In reply to Stephanie Hobson [:shobson] from comment #1)
> I bet we can accomplish this relatively easily with a background gradient
> only applied in the editor.
> 
> It might also be possible to force display of the scrolls bars. Dear Apple,
> Please stop breaking the web - xoxo.

It's not a web thing. Apple's standard UX configuration on recent versions of OS X only displays the scrollbars while scrolling is being performed. You can configure them to always show by default but I am not convinced that Firefox abides by that.

Comment 3

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.