> !! The solution - tabstops that expand or shrink to fit their contents 

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 > For as long as we continue to define each tabstop as being a multiple of N characters we will never be able to solve this problem satisfactorily. The problem is that we're using tabs and spaces to format text for aesthetic reasons rather than treating them semantically – tabs are for indenting and aligning text, spaces are for separating keywords. The solution then is to redefine how tabs are interpreted by the text editor. Rather than saying that a tab character (a "hard tab") will move the cursor until the cursor's position is a multiple of N characters, we should say that a tab character is a delimiter between table cells in a similar manner to how they're used in tab separated value (TSV) files.