CSS glossary entries for ‘W’

Web standards: Web standards is now a broad term referring a whole raft of technical standards for processing and transporting the content of web pages. Early popular usage tended to focus more narrowly on W3C standards and, in particular on CSS, because by far the most important obstacles to cross-platform web design were 'Internet Explorer's non-standard implementations of CSS. Since the launch of ‘IE8’ Microsoft's web browsers have tended to implement those CSS features that they support in a standard compliant way by default. Although subsequent versions of IE have tended to lack some advanced CSS features, while other browsers (like Chrome) have created compatibility problems by the early implementation of experimental features, most current browsers can be considered web standards ‘compliant’.
white-space: The white-space property is a CSS property which determines how whitespace within a selection is managed. It is typically used to override the default normal setting which requires consecutive spaces to be collapsed into a single rendered space, i.e. it is mostly used to preserve consecutive spaces and/or line breaks, although it can preserve line breaks while collapsing consecutive spaces.
width: The width property is a CSS property which specifies the distance between the left and right edges of the selected ‘layout box’. Which part of the selection's ‘box model’ constitutes its ‘edge’ depends on the presence or absence of a ‘box-sizing’ setting. In its absence the width applies to the distance between the left and right ‘content edges’. In its presence, the width can be measured between the left-right ‘content edges’ or ‘padding edges’ or ‘border edges’.
word-spacing: The word-spacing property is a CSS property which determines the regular distance between words in non-justified text.
word-wrap: The word-wrap property is a CSS property which determines whether or not a browser can break lines inside words in order to prevent overflow when an otherwise unbreakable string cannot fit within its containing box, i.e. it enforces wrapping within what are normally non-wrapping strings.