Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-text] For most languages, hyphens:auto should not hyphenate Capitalized words (#3927)

Well, what's "the right thing" for a browser to do regarding hyphenation of capitalized words? I don't think there's a clear answer to that, although I do think browsers should try for a sensible default behavior, and in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1550532 we just made the suggested adjustment for Firefox.

The problem is that in some cases authors/users may prefer that proper names not be hyphenated (as requested in the Mozilla bug); we can't reliably identify proper names in general text, but we can use capitalized words as the best available proxy for this (except in German); but this has the drawback that we'll also suppress hyphenation of non-names at the beginning of sentences; in some cases, this trade-off may be too great and it'd be preferable to allow capitalized hyphenation after all. I don't think a single hard-coded behavior will ever satisfy all use cases.

(A further refinement to the heuristic -- not yet implemented -- would be to make the behavior dependent on line width, so that as line width is reduced, constraints on what may be hyphenated are relaxed.)

Note that systems such as TeX (the `\uchyph` parameter) and InDesign (the "Hyphenate Capitalized Words" option in paragraph formatting) do expose this question to authors, recognizing that there is not a simple "correct" behavior that the application can universally use.

Obviously, authors can override the browser's heuristics by adding markup to individual names; the question here is what kind of default behavior, and how much author control, we can/should offer for (the overwhelming majority of) text that does not have that level of detailed markup.

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Received on Tuesday, 14 May 2019 07:55:45 UTC