Setting the size of a tab character in a pre element

When displaying code in an HTML page, you often want it to be correctly indented with tabs. Unfortunatly, setting a white-space:pre(like is the default on a

 element) to an element will transform any tab in the
equivalent of 8 space characters.

8 is way more than needed, 4 will be much suited, specially in a website design where the horizontal space is limited.

I've googled a lot, going from obscure old CSS drafts to proprietary implementation mailing lists, browsing CSS codes.

One interesting discussion can be found here, there even is a proposal for a tab-stops property on the W3C

Opera has a proprietary -o-tab-size. You just have to pass the number of space characters that should be used.

That's all I have for now...

I know I could replace every\t with 4  , or with a <span> that I'll style to match the desired width but it involves a back-end processing and I would have liked to style it directly.

Edit : There seems to have a -moz-tab-size property on the latest Firefox 3.7 nightlies

Tags : #white-space, #tab-stops, #tab, #o-tab-size, #moz-tab-size

Want to add something ? Feel free to get in touch on Twitter : @pixelastic