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In computer programming, indentation style is a convention, a.k.a. style, governing the indentation of blocks of source code.An indentation style generally involves consistent width of whitespace (indentation size) before each line of a block, so that the lines of code appear to be related, and dictates whether to use space or tab characters for the indentation whitespace.
There are three main types of indentation: first-line, hanging and block. Each example below is in a box that represents the page boundary and uses the common typesetting lorem ipsum content. The width of indentation here is in units of em spaces. For first-line indentation the first line of a paragraph is indented. A first-line indentation of ...
A colon at the start of the line produces a similar indent, but it produces incorrect HTML. See MOS:INDENT. (An initial : was intended only for use after ;, in constructing description lists, but most editors have used it almost everywhere for indenting.) {} is for actual quotations only.
Indentation style can assist a reader in various way including: identifying control flow and blocks of code. In some programming languages, indentation is used to delimit blocks of code and therefore is not matter of style. In languages that ignore whitespace, indentation can affect readability. For example, formatted in a commonly-used style:
Another example: when the spaces between words line up approximately above one another in several loose lines, a distracting river of white space may appear. [4] Rivers appear in right-aligned, left-aligned and centered settings too, but are more likely to appear in justified text, because of the additional word spacing.
As computers optimize code, they occasionally risk displaying unsavory results after condensing monotonous strings of characters (such as spaces). Thus, many templates around Wiki choose to avoid this hurdle by alternating different types of spaces (with the intention of displaying no differently than regular spaces).
The explicit structure of Lisp code allows automatic indenting, to form a visual cue for human readers. Another alternative is for each block to begin and end with explicit keywords. For example, in ALGOL 60 and its descendant Pascal, blocks start with keyword begin and end with keyword end.
Using the default HTML styling of most web browsers, it will indent the right and left margins both on the display and in printed form, but this may be overridden by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The non-semantic use of the blockquote element purely to indent text has been deprecated by the W3C ( World Wide Web Consortium ) since HTML 4. [ 2 ]