# A handful of small spec issues

**URL:** <https://talk.commonmark.org/t/a-handful-of-small-spec-issues/109>\
**Category:** Spec\
**Created:** [September 3, 2014, 9:40pm UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/a-handful-of-small-spec-issues/109 "2014-09-03T21:40:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4

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**Author:** ![poke](https://cdn.commonmark.org/user_avatar/talk.commonmark.org/poke/32/39_2.png) [@poke](https://talk.commonmark.org/u/poke)\
**Post date:** [September 4, 2014, 12:40am UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/a-handful-of-small-spec-issues/109/4 "2014-09-04T00:40:25Z")

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> [@zwol](#):
>
> I have literally never used any piece of software or hardware in which tab stops did not default to 8 spaces wide.

Opposite here. Apart from Git’s command line output, tabs are and _always_ have been 4 spaces to me. And while your textarea example might work, I don’t even know how I can enter a tab into a textarea (without copy-pasting).

> [@zwol](#):
>
> Given the syntax, we have to choose between allowing authors to write a code span that is a single space character, or a code span that is completely empty. The former is more useful.)

I would actually say, if the code span only contains whitespace, _leave everything there_. How else am I supposed to tell you otherwise in markdown, that you need to add two spaces after a line to insert a [hard line break](http://jgm.github.io/stmd/spec.html#hard-line-breaks) (for example). I’d say that when using spaces explicitely inside code-quotes, then the author likely has a reason to insert all those whitespace characters.

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_[View the full topic](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/a-handful-of-small-spec-issues/109)._