Re: hyphenation character data

* fantasai wrote:
>Are there any resources that CSS can point to for indicating the
>appropriate hyphenation character for a particular language?

Appropriate is what the author specifies, XSL FO for instance allows
authors to specify the character to use. If I had to find a formal
reference for German, I would probably check DIN 5008, but you quite
quickly run into ironic situations like the german Wikipedia article
on the matter saying U+2010 is the right character but actually using
U+002D in the example for hyphenation in line wrapping. I am sure you
would run into annoyed authors if browsers used U+2010 where authors
would find U+002D more appropriate, or vice versa, starting with me.

I also note that "appropriate" depends on, for instance, whether the
character is widely available and available in a suitable font, so
you don't get strange rendering due to font substitution. It does not
seem that there is a site that discusses this in great detail. My im-
pression also was that typographical conventions differed beyond the
choice of character, like in whether you put the character at the end
of the previous line or at the beginning of the next, but I could not
immediately find a reference so I might be misremembering or this may
no longer be true for in-use systems.

Could you clarify whether the CSS Working Group means to make this not
author-configurable, is just looking for good defaults, or maybe just
some helpful tutorial-like documentation?
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Thursday, 6 October 2011 00:12:21 UTC