Office programs and Web browsers interpret spaces and tabs differently. Office programs use character and tab spaces to indent text. Most Web browsers display one space when several consecutive spaces are encountered in an HTML file. Tabs are not displayed. When saving to HTML, Office spaces and tabs are displayed to the extent possible in the Web browser, and tab settings are stored for use in Office programs.
Office encloses two or more regular spaces in a Span element with the mso-spacerun: yes attribute, and it exports each nonbreaking space as an HTML nonbreaking space character ( ).
Office uses the tab-stops attribute to list the tab settings for a collection of text. To save tab settings in the HTML file, Office uses a Span element with the mso-tab-count style. Within this Span element, Office inserts enough spaces so that the browser can display the tab spacing. For tabs with leaders, Office places the appropriate ASCII character inside the Span element to emulate the leader type. Office stores default tab intervals in the Body element.
For information about the style attributes that Office uses and their possible values, see the Style Attributes topic.