Gunter Ganscher said:
If indentation is
uncomfortable for me, but is comfortable for others, shouldn't I indent
anyway?
Maybe not.
HTML is somewhat peculiar and different from most programming languages
in indentation, because white space may be significant, at least in
practice. This may force you to use unnatural formatting for HTML source.
For example,
<td>
<img src="foo" alt="bar">
</td>
is different from
<td>
<img src="foo" alt="bar">
</td>
in the sense that the former contains space characters before and after the
<img> element. And in practice, browsers may render those characters some
way, which is probably not what you want. (It's debatable what the
situation really means by the specs, but in any case the <td> element here
contains some character data content in addition to the <img> element. The
question is whether whitespace should be ignored in such a situation; the
specifications don't take a position on this.)
Moreover, although the latter is _by the specs_ equivalent to
<td><img src="foo" alt="bar"></td>
due to special rules in SGML about line breaks immediately after or before
a tag, browsers widely violate this and treat those line breaks as
equivalent to spaces, causing the same problem as above.
Thus, authors often need to put stuff on one line to avoid "white space
bugs". If the line would be excessively long, they may decide to use a line
break inside a tag, as in
<td><img src="foo"
alt="bar"></td>
where the line break is harmless.
As a separate issue, an attribute value should be on one line to avoid
varying oddities in browsers (and to follow newest recommendations).
Since an attribute value (especially an alt or a title attribute but also
many attribute values that are URLs) can be fairly long, this tends to mess
up any pretty printing of HTML source.
