Please note, this is a STATIC archive of website developer.mozilla.org from 03 Nov 2016, cach3.com does not collect or store any user information, there is no "phishing" involved.

Label and description

Line breaking

Under normal conditions, a description will not break long-running text and the text may be cropped or hidden. To cause the text to wrap:

Ensure the long-running text is a text node child of <description/> or <label/> (i.e., do not specify the long-running text in the value attribute of these elements).

The default style for these XUL elements includes white-space: wrap;. This reduces all whitespace chunks (including newlines) to single spaces. Text is permitted to wrap.

<description>I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate. What's that make us? Absolutely nothing!</description>

With white-space: pre; all whitespace, including newlines, is rendered literally. Text cannot wrap automatically but can still be achieved with <html:br/> if desired.

<description style="white-space: pre-wrap;">I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate. What's that make us? Absolutely nothing!</description>

With white-space: pre-wrap; all whitespace is rendered literally, but text is additionally permitted to wrap at spaces.

Note: Prior to Firefox 3, it was necessary to use -moz-pre-wrap instead of -pre-wrap.  You may wish to use both for backward compatibility.
<description style="white-space: pre;">I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.
 What's that make us?
 Absolutely nothing!</description>

Text can also be made to wrap by inserting an <html:br/> element regardless of the CSS style, but this creates a hard-break that does not change as parent elements resize.

<description>I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.<html:br/>
What's that make us?<html:br/>
Absolutely nothing!</description>

Using labels as anchors

Its possible to make a label look and act like an HTML <a> tag:

<label class="text-link" href="https://whatever.com" value="click here to go to whatever"/>

"text-link" is a built-in, predefined class.

Note: if running in a XULRunner application add the following preferences to your default preferences file:
pref("network.protocol-handler.expose.http", false);
pref("network.protocol-handler.warn-external.http", false);

Change or add additional protocols (https or ftp) as needed.

Document Tags and Contributors

Tags: 
 Contributors to this page: wbamberg, Sheppy, Kray2, Chbok, MarkFinkle, Shadow101, ericjung
 Last updated by: wbamberg,