John Gardner <gardnerjo...@gmail.com> wrote: |On 30 May 2016 at 23:20, Steffen Nurpmeso <stef...@sdaoden.eu> wrote: |> John Gardner <gardnerjo...@gmail.com> wrote: |>|> I have been convinced that soft hyphen is a control character and |>|> not something visual, |>| |>|Almost correct. |>| |>|Soft hyphens *do* describe potential breaking points, but they only |> become |>|visible when surrounding text is broken.
|> Yes. For display purposes however i think U+00AD can't be used |> directly, but will be replaced by the renderer to either nothing, |> if no wrap is to be applied at the character position, or |> something appropriate, like ASCII hyphen-minus or some extended |>|Web authors were encouraged to use the more semantic and reliable <wbr/> |>|element <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/wbr> |>|instead. |> |> I am, for one, sure that the HTML standard committee will someday |> manage to add markup for shitty baby napkins. The palms and |> beaches of their happenings seem to promote this direction. ^.^ | |I, uh, think something might've been lost in translation. :| So. That made me search the web and i've found: On UTF-8 encoded pages, <wbr> behaves like the U+200B ZERO-WIDTH SPACE code point. In particular, it behaves like a Unicode bidi BN code point, meaning it has no effect on bidi-ordering: <div dir=rtl>123,<wbr>456</div> displays, when not broken on two lines, 123,456 and not 456,123. For the same reason, the <wbr> element does not introduce a hyphen at the line break point. To make a hyphen appear only at the end of a line, use the soft hyphen character entity (­) instead. This element [.] was officially defined in HTML5. My opinion: HTML was derived from SGML as a strict abstraction of content and form(atting). But afaik HTML requires any conforming application to support Unicode since quite a long time, so then why duplicating behaviour? Is it because of «explicit is better»? So, then. Fine. I also would use <span> above, but the bigger the choice, the harder it is to choose (www.dict.cc). Years ago i've read Korpela's rant on this topic, but Markus Kuhn also has something nice to say: The original HTML 2 specification [6] by Tim Berners-Lee et al., still wisely leaves the semantics of SOFT HYPHEN untouched with the remark NOTE - Use of the non-breaking space and soft hyphen indicator characters is discouraged because support for them is not widely deployed. Unfortunately by HTML 4 [7], this had mutated into a complete reinterpretation of the purpose of the SOFT HYPHEN, compared to how it had been used over the past decade in output devices. What was originally a graphical character had turned into an invisible marker for a hyphenation opportunity: [.] This HTML 4 reinterpretation is essentially the semantics that Unicode then adopted as well. May the majority be with you. --steffen
