[Bug 13098] Clarify whether <wbr> has the same effect as the zero-width space character

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13098

Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
         Resolution|WONTFIX                     |
            Summary|State that <wbr> represents |Clarify whether <wbr> has
                   |the SOFT HYPHEN character   |the same effect as the
                   |(U+00AD/&shy;/&#xad;)       |zero-width space character

--- Comment #4 from Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> 2011-06-30 22:59:57 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #3)

A most helpful and educating reply. Thanks for the clear analysis. Btw, in
addition to Firefox and Chrome, then Konqueror, W3m and Lynx support wbr as
well.  IE8 only supports <wbr> in Quirks-Mode.  Opera does not seem to support
it at all.  But both IE, Firefox, Opera and Webkit support the zero-width
character, in all modes. (But Konqueror as well as the text browsers have
problems with the directly typed zero-width space character.) 

To what extent <wbr> is useful, given its rather poor support, is not clear to
me - one could perhaps just as well obsolete it. Zero-width space has
particulary many synonymous ways in which it can be represented, and this in
itself might be a reason to obsolete it:
     as<wbr>, 
     as directly typed, 
     as the 2 flavours of numerical character refences
     as 5 different named character refences - citing the named char ref table:
             NegativeMediumSpace;     U+0200B    &#8203;
             NegativeThickSpace;     U+0200B    &#8203;
             NegativeThinSpace;     U+0200B    &#8203;
             NegativeVeryThinSpace;     U+0200B    
             ZeroWidthSpace;     U+0200B

     It seems like Firefox and Webkit trunk supports all these ways.

> It's possible that <wbr> is the same as &zwsp;, but the latter might have other
> effects that aren't coming to mind.


I renamed and reopened this bug, for the following reasons:

(1) It does indeed seem like the synonymous character is the zero-width space
character. However, this does not change issue very much: There is still
confusion out there about what <wbr> represents - even you and I are not 100%
certain.  The spec should therefore clarify what character the <wbr> is
synonymous with.   Such a clarification would not only be useful to web authors
like myself. But it would also be useful and important when we making the HTML5
test suite: If both <wbr> and &#x200b; are meant to work the same way, then it
would make sense to have a parallel test cases.

(2) Also, the spec should point out that <wbr>/zerowidthspace is *not* the same
as the soft hyphen. Even Wikipedia explains that <wbr>/zwsp is related to - but
different from - SHY: "Its semantics and HTML implementation are comparable to
but different from the soft hyphen. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_space (An important effect of the
differences between ZeroWidthSpace and Soft Hypen is that zero-width breaks the
word so that it looks as several words [the name "word-break" is thus slightly
misleading - as it is a *space* character]. Wheras SHY breaks the word so that
it still looks like a single word. )

(3) The spec should clarify whether the <wbr> element in anyway is recommended
over a character (reference) representation, of if it is entirely up to the
author.

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Received on Thursday, 30 June 2011 22:59:59 UTC