Re: [csswg-drafts] Support for double hyphenation across line breaks (typographic convention) (#13688)

> Based on the text that is already in the specification, I think it would be justified to write [WPT tests](https://web-platform-tests.org/) that check this specific behavior in the relevant languages, and to file bugs on browsers that don't do it.

I think we need to be more explicit about what the behavior in question actually is. The description "when a word is hyphenated at a line break, a hyphen is shown both at the end of the first line and at the beginning of the next line" is misleading, IMO, in that it implies that _any time_ a word is hyphenated for line-breaking, this double hyphen will be used. That's not what is going on here.

In the Polish example shown above, there are _many_ instances of hyphenation where a double hyphen is _not_ used; indeed, AFAICS the only case on that page where a hyphen _is_ added after the break is the one marked in red. What's happening is that the line has been broken at an already-existing hyphen in a hyphenated compound, and therefore the dictionary introduces the additional hyphen after the break to indicate that there is a "real" hyphen here that would be present even without the line-break.

(Compare "Grot-Rowecki", just a few lines earlier. This has been hyphenated after the syllable "Ro-", but there's no repeated hyphen before "-wecki" on the next line. However, if the break had occurred two characters earlier, after "Grot-", I believe the hyphen _would_ have been repeated.)

This is a convention sometimes found in dictionaries across various languages (I think I've seen it in English, too), but seen rather less commonly in non-dictionary contexts.

I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect browsers to tie this directly to language, as I think the desired behavior is dependent not just on language but also on context or genre: typographic conventions desired in a dictionary may not be the same as a magazine or novel.

So there probably _should_ be a CSS property that controls this. If there are some languages where this behavior is universally expected, we could have `:lang(..)` rules in the UA stylesheet to apply it by default, but more generally, authors should be able to opt in/out of the behavior.

What should such a property be called? I'm not sure... the proposals here seem confusing in that they sound like they'd apply to _every_ hyphenation break. This is something different. Some phrase like `hyphen-explicit-repeat`?

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Received on Friday, 20 March 2026 09:29:40 UTC