- From: <bugzilla@jessica.w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 22:59:57 +0000
- To: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
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/­/­) |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 ​ NegativeThickSpace; U+0200B ​ NegativeThinSpace; U+0200B ​ 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 ​ 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. -- Configure bugmail: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the QA contact for the bug.
Received on Thursday, 30 June 2011 22:59:59 UTC